Standardization vs. Flexibility in the Cloud
Recently I discussed systems management with a Fortune 1000 IT architect who is planning a next-generation internal cloud. That IT organization (like most large ones) is extremely diverse with deployments ranging from high-uptime, professionally managed grids down to two-server apps managed directly by developers. For a big shop like that, internal cloud poses some difficult questions:
- What is the right architecture and tool selection for our new internal cloud?
- How do we bridge the gap between today’s wildly heterogeneous existing systems and tomorrow’s clean, standardized cloud environment?
Intelligent Change: The Goal of Intelligent System Automation
The following is an excerpt from The 6 Musts of Intelligent System Automation.
Get your free copy here.
Change is a dirty word for enterprise IT. This is because change is destabilizing, leading to outages and escalating IT costs. As a consequence, changes are avoided—and undertaken only when absolutely necessary.
20 Questions for Fast IT Troubleshooting
I’m thinking of a number between one and a million. Can you guess it? If I tell you whether your guesses are too high or too low, how many guesses do you need?
Thanks to the speed of exponential growth, you only need 20 guesses. A mere 10 guesses more and you get to a billion. Just keep splitting the range of possible answers: 500,000 too high, 250,000 too low, 375,000 too high, … When searching for a needle in a haystack, you make incredibly rapid progress if you can split the problem in half at each step.
Microsoft’s New Cloud Versioning
From Carl Brooks, we hear that Microsoft quietly released a new feature for their freshly-launched PaaS offering, Microsoft Azure: OS version control. Details are scant, but it appears to let Azure consumers select an underlying OS patch level (a combination of operating system and multiple patches) from a menu provided by Microsoft. Without that feature, applications in Azure run on a particular patch combination that is entirely controlled by Microsoft.
I can understand why the release was stealthy — for production apps, the platform would be useless without it! Platform patch control, even if coarse-grained, is table stakes for the cloud. Service managers know that no platform’s patch stream is safe enough to apply, untested, to operational services without significant risk of downtime. That’s what makes system patching so difficult; patches have unintended consequences that vary by application.
How Should Apps Get Into the Cloud?
James Urquhart at CNET kicked off an interesting discussion around app deployment for cloud: Do we need a new standard unit of delivery for cloud apps?
James suggests that IaaS and PaaS standardize on a bundle of the information that a cloud needs in order to run an application, including:
- Metadata
- The actual software
- Deployment and configuration metadata/scripts
- Runtime orchestration and service level metadata/scripts
Attacking the Global Collision of Complexity
Symantec just published their 2010 data center report. They polled 1,780 IT managers and VPs at enterprises of different sizes across all geographic areas. I recommend giving it a read — it’s easy to skim and they made a number of interesting observations.
Some key findings in that report confirm what we’ve been saying at rPath:
- Data centers are becoming more complex and harder to maintain — A third of IT managers say too many applications and too much complexity is a big or “huge” problem.
- Server counts are exploding across all operating systems — I was surprised to see that even the fifth-fastest growing OS is growing at 14% a year.
- Staffing remains tight — IT staffing isn’t growing to keep pace; at most organizations, it is flat or declining. 50% of organizations report being somewhat or extremely understaffed. And lack of budget is the chief culprit for 80% the understaffing.
Dealing with Change
Let’s face it: Nobody likes change.
And nobody likes it less than enterprise IT, which has come to fear change as a malevolent force—the unwelcomed houseguest—that invariably leads to unintended consequences.
When change arrives, bad things tend to happen.
Of course, IT has good reason to be fearful—change is incredibly disruptive to production environments. And it’s becoming more so with the growing complexity of software systems—more sources of change, faster rates of change and more systems to maintain.
