Considerations to choose cloud providers

Several times our customers ask us for the assessments to select an infrastructure provider for the given application set. Most of the times the discussions revolve around the security considerations and license agreements, but here are some of the parameters that I normally include in my considerations:

• Existing data center, support and depreciation
• Vendor relationships, and partnerships
• License agreements on software components
• Compliance
• Geo-location aspects, data residency considerations
• Security
• Performance, and application affinity
• Overall cost & TCO for the given years

Top 10 Laws for Cloud Computing

Here is an interesting article on the economics of cloud computing and the top 10 laws...

SaaS has led the market to date with the largest market size, highest gross margins, and highest per-seat pricing. Recently, however, we’ve seen the rapid emergence of hyper-growth businesses in the PaaS and IaaS markets demonstrating that these will soon be independent, multibillion-dollar segments in their own rights with the potential for massive sales volume and attractive cash flow characteristics.

The cloud computing and the platforms are expected to dynamically perform intelligent provisioning, services, and applications management.

 

BESSEMER CLOUD COMPUTING LAW #1: Less is more!

BESSEMER CLOUD COMPUTING LAW #2: Get instrument rated, and trust the 6C’s of Cloud Finance

BESSEMER CLOUD COMPUTING LAW #3: Study the sales learning curve and only invest behind success

BESSEMER CLOUD COMPUTING LAW #4: Forget everything you learned about software channels.

BESSEMER CLOUD COMPUTING LAW #5: Build Employee Software. Employees are now powerful customers, not just their managers! We’re witnessing the “Consumerization of Software” so focus on ease of use.

BESSEMER CLOUD COMPUTING LAW #6: By definition, your sales prospects are online – Savvy online marketing is a core competence (sometimes the only one) of every successful cloud business.

BESSEMER CLOUD COMPUTING LAW #7: The most important part of Software-as-a-Service isn’t “Software” it’s “Service”! Support, support, support!

BESSEMER CLOUD COMPUTING LAW #8: Leverage and monetize the data asset.

BESSEMER CLOUD COMPUTING LAW #9: Mind the GAAP!

BESSEMER CLOUD COMPUTING LAW #10: Cloudonomics requires that you plan your fuel stops very carefully. 

http://www.bvp.com/sites/default/files/bvps_10_laws_of_cloud_saas_winter_2010_release.pdf
 

Enterprise Cloud Migration Strategies

Thought this one was very appropriate to what I see in the industry everyday!

Why Cloud? Change Business Capability...

One of the great feedback on 'Cloud' that I heard in the recent past... is to look at cloud as a way to do genuinely new things -- or in Tonsetic's words, "change their business capability."

Most of the times we get struck with conversations on public/private etc, but the scenarios that I see everyday in my business capacity is is actually radical. These comments can't be any more true:

"Cloud often presents itself as not that much of a different way of working than on premises," he said. "If it is a change at all, that's often presented as just a change in the technology, which is often seen as at a lower altitude than business process."

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/cios-consider-skipping-private-cloud/240151042

15 elite Amazon cloud integrators

I am happy to see this today: http://www.zdnet.com/15-elite-amazon-cloud-integrators-7000012344/
 
...an integrator has to meet the status requirements for an Advance Consulting Partner and then meet other qualitative and quantitative requirements. Among those considerations are "exceptional customer service", a significant number of customers that run their applications on top of the Amazon cloud infrastructure, and a healthy consulting practice based on cloud migration and implementations.

Amazon updates this list every year (the next selection process will begin in mid 2013), but here are the 15 companies that currently make up the Premier Consulting Partner list. I'm listing them alphabetically...

Cognizant: The Teaneck, New Jersey, service provider and developer specializes in cloud transformation assessments; its Cloud360 platform provides end-to-end management services once a migration has taken place.

VMware CEO says "if a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever..."

Some quotes that were previously unheard of from VMware. Indicates the changing world.

"We want to own corporate workload," the report quotes Gelsinger as saying. "We all lose if they end up in these commodity public clouds. We want to extend our franchise from the private cloud into the public cloud and uniquely enable our customers with the benefits of both. Own the corporate workload now and forever."

...

VMware President and Chief Operating Officer Carl Eschenbach reportedly told the audience, "I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books."

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/02/28/vmware-to-partners-if-amazon-cloud.html

Know what cloud services that you use...

This is a good article in understanding which cloud services that one should and one shouldn't. If not understood carefully, cloud adoption can lead into a serious vendor lock-in for life. The low costs of storage encourage data proliferation, and again causes vendor lock-in. 

Be careful in which cloud services you consume.

http://gigaom.com/2013/02/26/fear-of-lock-in-dampens-cloud-adoption/

...

“When you move to cloud, you should be increasing your choices, not decreasing them. You don’t buy three on-premises apps but you can use three services from three vendors in the cloud,” said Robert Jenkins, co-founder and CTO of Cloud Sigma, the Zurich-based cloud provider.

...

It’s fairly straightforward to move things off a bare-bones infrastructure as a platform. But not so easy when higher-end services get layered atop the platform. Even Amazon fans worry that the edition of Amazon’s Simple Workflow Service and other add ons create barriers to exit.

Azure outage due to Expired SSL certificate

In less than 2 days of coming out with good performance numbers on object storage, Azure had an outage due to an expired SSL certificate. I remember of a very similar problem for their microsoft.com domain with expired DNS registration in the year 2000 (or 2001) during the Christmas holiday time. Looks like silly housekeeping items are causing business issues.

Microsoft's failure to renew the security certificate apparently caused the Azure service to go down shortly before 4 p.m. EST Friday. The breakdown prevented Azure customers from accessing files kept in Microsoft's data centers.

Microsoft Azure overtakes Amazon's cloud in performance test

Azure's cloud is faster at uploading and downloading files to the cloud, Amazon still more scalable, storage provider Nasuni finds... Nasuni uses public cloud resources in its enterprise storage offering, so each year the company conducts a series of rigorous tests on the top CSPs' clouds in an effort to see which companies offer the best performing, most reliable infrastructure. Last year, Amazon Web Services' cloud came out on top, but this year Microsoft Azure outperformed AWS in performance and reliability measures. AWS is still better at handling extra-large storage volumes, while Nasuni found that the two OpenStack powered clouds it tested -- from HP and Rackspace -- were lacking, particularly at larger scales. 

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/021913-azure-aws-266831.html?hpg1=bn 

Reid Hoffman's 10 Rules for Entrepreneurial Success

I liked these top 10 mandates for entrepreneurs from the co-founder and angel investor Reid Hoffman:

At last week's the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, Hoffman offered what he calls his "Ten Rules on Entrepreneurship." And if anyone is qualified to come up with such a list, it's this web-savvy wizard who was a founding board member and executive vice president of PayPal and now serves as a partner at venture capital powerhouse Greylock Partners.

1. Be disruptive. Ask yourself: "Is this massive and different? It's got to be ten-times different. It's got to be something that changes an industry." Hoffman uses Skype as an example, calling it a disruptive company because, "it removes these very expensive cross barrier phone charges."
2. Aim big. You'll probably wind up plowing the same amount of time into a small business as you will a big one. So, don't be intimidated by your own big ideas, as there are multiple ways of realizing them.
3. Grow your network. Your network includes investors, advisers, employees and customers. With a broad network, you have the ability to make important, global-sized changes.
4. Plan for better or worse. Part of planning is that you might come across something you weren't expecting and you pivot. And if something doesn't work, you must ask yourself: "What is my Plan B?"
5. Maintain flexible persistence. On one hand, the goal is to have a vision and be persistent. On the other hand, flexibility and being able to change based on what your customers want is paramount. "The art is knowing when to be persistent and when to be flexible and how to blend them."
6. Launch early. "Unless you're Steve Jobs, you're most likely partially wrong about what your theory was." So launch early and often. Launching early attracts customer engagement, and it's the customer who's going to tell you what's wrong so you can correct it.
7. Seek honesty. You need friends who will tell you that you have an ugly baby. Keep your aspirations high, but don't drink your own Kool-Aid -- all the while leveraging the advice of your friends.
8. Be everywhere. It's important to have a great idea for a product, but it's downright vital to have a wide distribution of it. "You can have a kickass product, but if it doesn't get to millions of people, it's irrelevant."
9. Culture is key. You must get hiring right the first time. While experience is impressive, you'll need people who can adapt and thrive amid volatility -- especially in the beginning.
10. Break these rules. The rules of entrepreneurship are not laws of nature. You can break them. What's more, don't listen to all of the rules all of the time.
 

Software license management in the cloud is a mess

Here is a very beautiful and apt article written on software licensing in cloud.

http://info.cloudboltsoftware.com/blog/bid/212556/Cloud-Management-Vendor-Impact-of-Software-Licensing-For-the-Cloud

What’s really odd is that those large vendors also claim to know about cloud. My resulting questions to you are simple:

• Are you relying on cloud strategy from a company that actively uses their software licensing to discourage or prevent you from moving to a more open cloud-centric IT model?
•  Are they leveraging their licenses to force you down the path they want you to?

My subtext:  If you’re listening to intently to those large vendors, the answer to both is “yes”.  Proceed with caution if your primary cloud strategy comes from your hardware, middleware, database, or even OS vendor.

...

Many large vendors (it won’t be hard to find which ones I’m talking about here) take specific steps to limit BYSOL (just to name a few I came across):

• Require specific understanding of underlying hardware architectures or processor specifications
• Require licensing based on the physical, not virtual host
• Mandate customers run vendor-provided license tracking, further complicating multi-location or multi-environment installations
• Prohibit software from being virtualized
• Force purchase of higher-cost public cloud resources which rope in the underlying OS license regardless of customer license availability
• Force purchase of “License Mobility” options in order to run software in public clouds

Virtualization and so called "Private Clouds"

An interesting comment from RedHat during the acquisition of ManageIQ this week:

http://www.serverwatch.com/server-news/red-hat-linux-grows-top-deals-as-private-cloud-management-enters-batting-practice.html

"A lot of people will say they have a private cloud because they have a bunch of virtualized servers, but truly when you think about managing an application portfolio or an elastic infrastructure, that is still quite nascent," Whitehurst said.

"So that's a very large opportunity, we believe, in the future," Whitehurst continued, "but we are, again, we're in batting practice. We haven't even started the first inning."

Here is an interview that I gave to Cloudstory.in

Enterprises today are finding it extremely challenging to manage the assets running across physical, virtual, Private Cloud and Public Cloud. They are looking for tools that helps them take control of the infrastructure through a single, unified environment. There is a huge opportunity that exists in the multi-cloud management tools market. Cloud360 from Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTS) is one of the leading Cloud management platforms for enterprises.

I got a chance to interview Mr. Ramesh Panuganty, the founder and MD for Cloud360. Ramesh shares his views about the Cloud adoption in enterprises, the challenges they face and how their product addresses them.

http://cloudstory.in/2012/12/cloud-conversations-interview-with-ramesh-panuganty-md-cloud360-at-cognizant-technology-solutions/

Recorded session: Enterprise Application Operations in the Cloud Powered by Cloud360 & AWS

AWS and Cognizant invite you to learn more about Cloud360, an enterprise IT management solution that enables enterprise application migration and operations on AWS. Cloud360 provides a comprehensive portfolio of services for provisioning, deploying, monitoring, managing and securing enterprise applications running on AWS. Learn more: https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers/si/cognizant

Possible spin off of vFabric line of products from VMware

Finally the news seems to be coming out...
 
VMware plans to turn over SpringSource, Cloud Foundry, GemStone and other non-core technologies over to a new EMC-owned subsidiary, GigaOM has learned. The move helps separate the money-making, enterprise-focused VMware business from the future CloudFoundry unit that will compete against Amazon and Microsoft Azure.

VMware is finally getting ready to spin off most of its non-core products to an EMC-run subsidiary, GigaOM has learned. If everything goes according to plan, the move will be announced next week, according to several sources familiar with the effort.

http://gigaom.com/cloud/remember-that-vmware-spin-off-its-baaa-aack/ 

The AWS Report - Ramesh Panuganty of Cognizant

... my recent interview with Jeff Barr @AWS.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/the-aws-report-ramesh-panuganty-of-cognizant.html

Cloud 360 helps technology and business managers to deploy and manage cloud-based architectures in a flexible and scalable fashion. Learn more about Cloud 360...

AWS speeds-up EBS and reduces instances pricing

Another busy week for AWS which added new compute instance types, cut prices on existing ones, and increased the limit on provisioned IOPS for EBS volumes. Amazon is getting busier as more public cloud options come on line. 

Some computing and storage tasks require faster data input/output than others. That’s why in August, Amazon Web Services said customers could, for an additional fee, allocate up to 1,000 Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) per EBS storage volume.  On Thursday, the company doubled the limit to 2,000 IOPS per EBS volume according to a post on the very busy AWS blog.  Faster storage input/output is important in database and transaction processing applications. Insights here.

Enterprise Application Operations in the Cloud Powered by Cloud360 & AWS

AWS and Cognizant are pleased to invite you to attend this live webinar where you will learn more about Cloud360, an enterprise IT management solution that enables enterprise application migration and operations on AWS. Cloud360 provides a comprehensive portfolio of services for provisioning, deploying, monitoring, managing and securing enterprise applications running on AWS.

Featured speakers will provide insights into how Cloud360 enables enterprises to achieve: 

• Rapid Provisioning: cutting down time from weeks to minutes.
• Simplified IT Management: simple service management, distributed control.
• Improved Planning and Budgeting: more insights, better cost control.
• Automated Governance: controlled usage, enterprise compliance.
• Improved Security: auditing and variance detection.

Agenda:

• State of the Cloud - Paul Roehrig, Cognizant
• AWS Platform Overview - Tom Stickle, AWS
• Cloud360 for the Enterprise - Ramesh Panuganty, Cognizant

Who should attend:

• CIOs, CTOs, IT Executives, Enterprise Architects, and other Technical IT Leaders

Date / Time

• Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - 10AM PST/ 1PM EST

Attendees get a chance to win a Kindle Fire HD.

>> Register now for this live webinar on Nov 6

Cloud Computing: Hey, Hey, You, You, Get Off of My Cloud! - Geoffrey Moore

The economics of cloud computing are so compelling it is clear, over time, that it will re-engineer the entire landscape of enterprise IT.  It is that little phrase—over time­­—that poses challenges, for customers and vendors alike.  Different applications will drive cloud adoption at different paces and in different directions.  To help sort out your priorities, here is a cartoon of the various types of clouds in nature, with a companion cartoon mapping them to the cloud applications getting the most traction these days.

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121015205517-110300724-cloud-computing-hey-hey-you-you-get-off-of-my-cloud?_mSplash=1