Taking Advantage of Public and Private Clouds Requires the Right Cloud Management Software
March 7, 2011
Cloud computing is just a few years old, but already has given rise to two separate approaches and architectures; one public, like Amazon’s Web services, the other private, usually inside a corporate data center. Computer users assigned to business units are attracted to the direct access and easy provisioning of the public cloud, since servers can be up and running in a few minutes. IT organizations, on the other hand, value the security and control they associate with private clouds, and worry about the proliferation of public cloud instances and its potential impact on corporate data and security policies. It’s a familiar tug-of-war.
Successful businesses have lately come to realize that both public and private clouds have advantages, and want to make able to use both of them when appropriate. Consider Intuit, the software company does the load testing for its online TurboTax program on servers at Amazon; because real customer data is not being used, there are no regulatory or privacy issues. However, once the software is made available to the public it runs on Intuit’s on-premises machines, as one would expect for information of such a sensitive nature.
Being able to move between public and private clouds in this manner requires the right kind of cloud management software, a true "Cloud Operating System" that doesn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to cloud architecture. Instead, it must make use of, when appropriate, the growing number of cloud technologies the marketplace is accepting.
In a properly designed Cloud Operating System, an application runs in either the public or the private cloud depending on the application itself, in connection with company policies. These policies might involve, for example, the kinds of data the application uses, or the extent to which the application is mission-critical to the organization.
The actual placement of an individual application’s workload in either the public or private cloud should occur automatically and transparently to end users. Be they in IT or in business units, users should concern themselves only with choosing the proper policy for the workload. Cloud management software should then take over, determining where precisely in the public-private cloud ecosystem the program will run.
This means that to be effective a Cloud Operating System software needs to shield users from the multitude of different command systems they currently need to master to move between public and private clouds. Instead the software must present a unified user experience, with the same authorization, the access control and interfaces regardless of the workload’s final destination. Users can focus on their workload needs using credentials set up centrally by IT. That protects the enterprise from employees disclosing their credentials to others, or worse, taking them with them when they leave the organization.
A Cloud Operating System must also give users a painless way to move data and applications back and forth between public and private clouds. That’s a seemingly straightforward task, but one whose current complexity routinely leads to lengthy and unexpected delays in what IT workers had assumed was going to be a straightforward migration process.
So how might this hybrid public-private blend architectures play out in an enterprise? Traditional mission-critical ERP programs are less likely to migrate to new cloud infrastructures, just yet. That’s because these programs have strict requirements for stability and fault tolerance and their data is subject to stringent regulatory and compliance regimes. In addition, the programs themselves do not require the constant changing and updating that can occur so easily in a cloud environment. ERP customers are much more concerned about keeping the programs running stably than they are with making daily adjustments to the underlying infrastructure. While mission-critical workloads won’t be the first ones that IT will move to cloud infrastructures, they will clearly be candidates for the private cloud in the second phase of cloud adoption.
By contrast, programs built on new generations of Web-based development environments, such as Ruby on Rails, are perfect candidates for internal clouds right away. Whether you are in a development and test environment or beginning work with a new Platform as a Service or Software as a Service offering, a Cloud Operating System technologies will make possible a new level of agility and flexibility into your organization. You can scale your infrastructure as fast as you can stack racks of hardware without having to bother with the lengthy server provisioning cycles once associated with IT deployment.
Of course, you can also use third party cloud resources like Amazon to complement your own infrastructure when doing so makes sense. Intuit used the cloud for testing; some companies move to the cloud to meet seasonal demands, or to run one of the many commercial SaaS offering becoming available. Cloud management software can transform the public cloud from a rogue resource snuck in the back door by business units trying to circumvent IT and make it instead a viable business tool, properly integrated into an enterprise’s systems.
There are a few more things that IT managers need to be aware of when choosing cloud management software besides its ability to handle both public and private clouds. Has the software been designed from the ground up to deal with the complexities of today’s computing environments or are those features bolted-on as an afterthought to software initially designed simply to set up virtual machines? How much does it automate the time-consuming, repetitive manual tasks often associated with creating and configuring virtual machines? And can it scale up as effortlessly as modern IT operations are discovering they need to?
IT managers will need to deal with those issues, too, as they make a decision about cloud management software. But at the very least, they need to make sure that when they ask a cloud management vendor if they are public or private, the answer they hear back is "Yes."