Cloud management dashboards need a rear view mirror
June 15, 2012
On the geological time scale of data we can see various plateau marking points along the way. First the Earth cooled, then the dinosaurs came… and then we started to build databases and data centres, which eventually evolved into their preferred niche habitat existing as virtualised hosted resources delivered via computing-as-a-service solutions.
So the cloud happened and it was there and it was good.
Actually, it was good, but it could have been better, said the vendors. It could have been more optimised, more managed and more automated. We could have had a world where clouds could be (wait for it) “provisioned for interoperable orchestration” so that applications and their data could be controlled like obedient children perhaps…
So what beasts might be roaming in this territory?
In the product zone here we find Parallels, a cloud services delivery software company that aims to help both ISVs package their software to be delivered in the cloud, as well as to help "hosters" and other service providers with cloud provisioning to deliver the most in-demand bundles of applications to help them drive their own profitable revenue growth.
But what does cloud provisioning really mean?
John Zanni, vice president of service provider marketing and alliances at Parallels explains that this is all about automating every aspect of a cloud application or service offering from delivery through to managing and billing services on a day to day basis. Management is delivered via a dashboard, or “control panel” to use Parallels parlance.
"It’s all about guidance in terms of how a customer bundles their cloud offering,” explains Zanni. “A typical cloud offering will feature the ‘must-haves’ from storage to processing to email etc. But there will also be optional extras such as anti-virus controls, domain names, Secure Sockets Layer technology and possibly Content Delivery Network (CDN) site acceleration technology from the likes of CloudFlare.”
The company’s support for the open Application Packaging Standard, combined with its Parallels Automation product, are two key elements in in its cloud services delivery strategy at the higher end. As previously explained on Cloud Pro, this Parallels Automation packages up operational and business support systems with integrated provisioning, billing and self-service management features to enable service providers to offer cloud services to small and medium businesses (SMBs).
But isn’t Parallels and its cloud management dashboard products just too forward focused on the dashboard? Surely, when you drive any vehicle using a dashboard (or control panel) you also want a rear view mirror which, in this case, would be some sight of the real-world data flows passing through the cloud servers in use and the users’ ever-changing requirements.
A rear view on a bumpy road?
Zanni insists that Parallels Automation is indeed this responsive to a “bumpy road” of real world data if you will; insisting that his company’s software allows for elastic scalability when driving on the uneven surface of customer’s data requirements, offering as they do the flexibility to grow or shrink resources instantly as demands increase or decrease. But flexible or not, the Parallel’s proposition is still essentially a turnkey technology solution.
"As is always the case with any turnkey technology (as you might see in the case of cloud brokerage for example) there is always less flexibility," says Zanni.
So, if we may extend the dashboard in-car analogy on last time, have we got a road map?
“Absolutely yes. There are reporting tools in our products so that you can always see how a deployment is behaving — and, very crucially, that reporting data is available for analysis outside of the tool itself so that it can be integrated into a Business Intelligence source for deeper insight,” says Zanni.
So by arguing this technology’s worth then, cloud dashboards and control panels do have some insight into the rear view mirror — and automated application deployment does save hosters and their support staff time, when they might have been otherwise engaged changing gear or even changing platform.
Just one question then: who writes the Highway Code on the cloud superhighway or are we all at risk of crashing still? It’s early days; just don’t break the speed limit.