If cloud can’t wait, will you?

By Marco Meinardi in events, startups 0 Comment

A few days ago I have participated as a panelist in the webinar titled “Cloud Can’t Wait” alongside Michael Coté (@cote), analyst at 451 Research, Jared Stauffer (@jaredstauffer), CEO at Brinkster and Jim Foley, SVP Market Development at Flexiant.

We have debated the cloud opportunity. Sounds old? Maybe. However, surprisingly enough, the majority of IT infrastructure buyers haven’t adopted it yet. Skepticism, natural resistance to change, staff self-preservations and other excuses are amongst the primary reasons for that. If you think about it, this is actually pretty normal when a technology is so much disrupting the status quo.

The title of the webinar “Cloud Can’t Wait” may sound like a way to build the hype but, with regard to cloud, I think we all concur that, by now, the hype is way over. As I’m sure we agree that, indeed, the cloud can’t wait. Those who’ve fully embraced it have demonstrated to have significant advantages over those who haven’t, and these advantages are directly affecting their competitiveness and even their ability to stay in business.

The opportunity is for everyone

We talked about the cloud focusing on the infrastructure side of it. We have deliberately excluded SaaS consumption from the statistics and the debate, as that has a totally different adoption curve and, when put in the same basked, can easily mislead the conclusions. So rule number one, treat SaaS numbers separately.

Michael Coté presented an interesting categorisation of cloud infrastructure services, segmented as follows:

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): compute, storage and network “raw” infrastructure.
  • Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): supporting developers and middleware integration they require.
  • Infrastructure-Software-as-a-Service (ISaaS): the applications required to manage IT infrastructure, including backup, archiving, disaster recovery (DR), capacity planning and, more generically, IT management as a service.

Seeing ISaaS as third category was pretty interesting to me as we all knew it existed but we never managed to label it correctly. And as Michael stated later on, expertise in this specific category is what some service providers, mostly those coming from the managed services space, can actually offer as value add on top of raw infrastructure, in order to win business in this space.

So what is this cloud opportunity we are referring to? Again, Michael explained it this way:

“[With a 29% year over year growth rate] there is the opportunity to get involved early and [as a vendor] participating in gathering lots of that cash. Instead, cloud buyers such as developers or enterprises, are not interested in participating in this growth, but in the innovation that comes out of this cloud space, they want to use this innovation and efficiency to really differentiate themselves in their own business”

So the opportunity is there and it is a win-win for everyone.

Why people are buying cloud and who are they?

If you ask yourself why people are buying cloud and what they’re using it for, you maybe won’t find the answers easily. That’s where the work of 451 Research becomes really helpful. As Michael told us, from the conversations they have everyday, it came out that most organisations use the cloud because of “the agility that it brings, the speed you can deploy IT and [afterwards] that you can use IT as a differentiator. [Because cloud] speeds time to market”.

To that, I would add that cloud also speeds the ability to deliver changes which translates into adaptability, essential for any chance of success in our rapidly transforming economy.

Michael continued on this topic:

“Over the past roughly 5 to 10 years much of the focus of IT has been on cost savings, keeping the lights on as cheaply as possible, but things are changing and qualitatively we see this in conversations we have all the time, companies are more interested in using IT to actually do something rather than just saving money, and cloud is perfectly shaped for offering that”

Great. This seems to be now well understood. The days of explaining to organisation that there is more to the cloud than the simple shift from CAPEX to OPEX, are gone.

Who are buying cloud infrastructure services today? My first answer went to:

“Developers. This word returns a lot whenever we talk about cloud. They’ve been the reason of the success of AWS, for sure. That’s because they just ‘get it’, they understand the advantages of the cloud around how they can transform infrastructure into code. For them, spinning a server is just like writing any other line of code for doing anything else. They managed to take advantage of the cloud from the very early days and they contributed to make cloud what it is today under many aspects”

With regard to enterprises, I also added:

“enterprises are [currently] investing in private clouds because that’s the most natural evolution of their traditional IT departments, but eventually, as they get to provide cloud, it’s gonna be extremely easy to get them to consume cloud [services] from third parties. That’s because cloud is more of a mindset than just a technology”

How can you profit from the cloud opportunity?

So you’re a service provider and you want to participate in the cloud opportunity. How do you do that? Michael suggests to use the “best execution venue” approach. That starts, as Michael explains, with understanding the type of workload or applications that you want to address. Then ask yourself what skills, capabilities and what assets do you have that you can leverage to address a specific type of workload? This will tell you what value you can bring on top of raw infrastructure in order to compete and take advantage of this fast-growing multi-billion market.

My comment on this was:

“Eventually service providers should not consider themselves just part of one of these [IaaS, PaaS or ISaaS, Ed.] segments. Eventually I think the segmentation of this type will not there anymore, and there will be another segmentation based more on use cases, where the service provider will specialise on something and will pick a few services to make the perfect portfolio to match a specific use case in a target market”

Yes I’m a big fan of the use case approach. As I’m a big fan of trying to understand what the cloud is exactly being used for. Even if the press tries to push the cloud as heavily commoditised service, you should never stop asking yourself what your customers are doing with it, what applications they’re running and what else you can do to make their life easier.

In any case, either you decide to leverage your existing capabilities or you try to learn what your customers want to do with your cloud, we all agreed around the following statement: it’s still very early days. As Michael again explains, there are still lots of options to get involved, it’s a great time to get involved, and the doors are definitely not closed.

I’d say they’re absolutely wide open. And many have already crossed the doorway. How about you?

You can listen to the full recording of the webinar at this link.

Docker: not just containers. Thoughts from DockerCon Europe

By Marco Meinardi in events 0 Comment

Developers. Developers. Developers. I guarantee this was the most spoken word at DockerCon Europe 2014, the hottest software conference that just took place in Amsterdam last week. I was so lucky to get a ticket (as it sold out in a couple of days!) and be part of this amazing event that, despite a few complaints heard regarding too much of a “marketing love fest”, offered a lot in understanding market directions, trends and opportunities for software vendors.

So what is Docker? A container technology? No. Well, yes, but there is more to Docker. Despite being known as container technology, Docker is mainly a tool for packaging, shipping and running applications. A piece of infrastructure is now a simple means to do something else and requires no infrastructure skills to consume it. With containers now mainstream, the industry has now completed a further step towards making developers the main driver of IT infrastructure demand.

But at DockerCon, Docker employees appointed the project as a “platform” with the goal of making it easy to build and run distributed applications. A platform made of different components that are “included, but removable”. In fact, during one of the keynote sessions, Solomon Hykes (@solomonstre), creator of the Docker project, announced three of these new components that are now available alongside the well-known Docker engine:

  • Docker Machine
  • Docker Swarm
  • Docker Compose

As the community demanded, these three components have not been incorporated in the same binary as the container engine. But with this launch, Docker is now officially stepping into orchestration, clustering and scheduling.

Apart from the keynote, many of the breakout sessions were run by Docker partners, showing lots of interesting projects and more building blocks for creative engineers. In other sessions, organizations like ING Bank, Société Générale and BBC, explained how they use Docker and its benefits, including how Docker helps build their continuous delivery pipeline. Besides adopting the required technology stack, continuous delivery was also described as a fundamental organizational change that companies need to go through eventually. To this point, my most popular tweet during the two days has been a simple quote from Henk Kolk, Chief Architect at ING Bank Netherlands (@henkkolk):

Here’s my paraphrased version of Kolk’s session – Break the silos, empower engineers, build small product development teams and ship decentralized micro services. Cultural and organizational change has been described as important as the revolution in software architecture or cloud adoption. There can’t be one without the other. So you’d better be ready, educated and embrace it.

Docker Machine

The project that caught most of our attention at Flexiant was Docker Machine. It enables Docker to create machines into different clouds directly from the command line. My colleague Javi (@jpgriffo), author of krane.io, has been looking at it since it was a proposal and during the announcement of Docker Machine, we managed to send the very first pull request for the inclusion of a driver for Flexiant Concerto into the project, ahead of VMware and GCE. If Flexiant Concerto driver will be merged over the next days, Docker users will be able to go from “Zero to Docker” (as it was pitched by its author Ben Firshman – @bfirsh) in any cloud, with a single consistent driver. Exciting! We’re absolutely proud of this and we believe we have much more to give to the Docker community, given our expertise in cloud orchestration. Be prepared for more pull requests to follow.

The Risk

Docker has been blowing minds since the first days of the famous video (21 months ago!). It makes so much sense that it’s been adopted with a speed we’ve never seen in any open source project before. Even those who do not understand it are trying to jump on the bandwagon just to leverage its brand and market traction. This doesn’t come without risks. With a large community, an eco-system with important stakes and a commercial entity behind (Docker, Inc.) there will be conflicts of interests, with “overstepping” onto the domain of those partners that helped make Docker what is today. We’ve already seen this with the CoreOS launch of Rocket a couple of days ago.

Docker, Inc. needs to drive revenue and, despite seeing Solomon Hykes make a lot of effort to keep an impartial and honest governance over his baby, I’m sure it’s not going to be a painless process. Good luck Solomon!

The Opportunity

High risks usually mean high potential return. The return here can be high, not just for Docker, Inc., but for the whole world of IT. Learning Docker and understanding its advantages can drive the development of applications in a totally different way. Not having to create a heavy resource-wasting virtual machine (VM) for everything will boost the rise of micro services, distributed applications and, by reflection, cloud adoption. With this, comes scalability, flexibility, adaptability, innovation and progress. I don’t know if Docker will still be such a protagonist over the next year or two, but what I know is that it will have fundamentally changed the way we build and deliver software.

This post originally appeared on Flexiant.com.

Why developers won’t go straight to the source

By Marco Meinardi in research 0 Comment

I’m so excited. On last Wednesday Flexiant has announced the acquisition of the Tapp technology platform and business. I met the guys behind it quite a while ago and I have never refrained from remarking how great their technology is (see here). I recognized a trend in their way of addressing the cloud management problem and I’m so glad to be part of, right now.

Disclaimer. I am currently working for Flexiant as Vice President Products. I have endorsed this acquisition and I am fully behind the reasons and convinced of the potential of it. This is my personal blog and whatever you read here has not been agreed with my employer in advance and therefore it represents my very personal opinion.

Right after the acquisition (read more about it here) we’ve heard tremendous noise on social networks and the press. David Meyer (@superglaze) of GigaOm in particular wrote up a few interesting comments and he picked up well the reasoning behind it, but he also ended the article with an open question:

“This [the Tapp technology platform] would help such players [Service Providers] appeal to certain developers that are currently just heading straight for EC2 or Google.
 
Of course, this is ultimately the challenge for the likes of Flexiant – can anything stop those developers going straight to the source? That question remains unanswered.”

Well, I’d like to answer that question and say why I’m actually convinced there is a lot of value to add for multi-cloud managers.

Much has been written these days from the business side of the acquisition and I don’t have anything meaningful to add. Instead, I would like to raise a few interesting points from a technology point of view (that’s my job, after all) and unveil those values that are maybe not so obvious at the first sight.

Multi-cloud management

Multi-cloud management per se has a very large meaning spectrum. There are multi-cloud managers brokerage, therefore primarily on getting you the best deal out there. Despite this is a good example about how to provide a “multi-cloud” value, I’m still wondering how they can actually find a way to compare apples with oranges. In fact, cloud infrastructure service offerings are so different and heterogeneous that being simply a cloud broker will make it extremely difficult to succeed, deliver real value and differentiate. So, point number one: Tapp isn’t a cloud brokerage technology platform.

Other multi-cloud managers deliver value by adding a management layer on top of existing cloud infrastructures. This management layer may be focused on specific verticals like scaling Internet applications (e.g. Rightscale) or providing enterprise governance (e.g. Enstratius, now Dell Multicloud Manager). By choosing a vertical, they can address specific requirements, cut off the unnecessary stuff from the general purpose cloud provider and enhance the user experience of very specific use cases. That’s indeed a fair point but not yet what Tapp is all about.

So why, when using Tapp, developers won’t “go straight to the source”? Well, first of all, let’s make clear that developers are already at the source. In fact, to use any multi-cloud manager you need an AWS account or a Rackspace account (or any other supported provider account). You need to configure your API keys in order to enable to communication with the cloud provider of choice. So if someone is using your multi-cloud manager, it means that he prefers it over the management layer provided by the “the source”.

The cloud provider lock-in

One of the reasons behind Amazon’s success is the large portfolio of services they rolled out. They’re all services that can be put together by end users to build applications, letting developers focus just on their core business logic, without worrying too much about queuing, notifying, load balancing, scaling or monitoring. However, whenever you use one of the tools like ELB, Route53, CloudWatch or DynamoDB you’re locking yourself into Amazon. The more you use multi-tenant proprietary services that exist only on a specific provider, you won’t be able to easily migrate your application away.

You may claim to be “happy” to be locked in a vendor who’s actually solving your problems so well, but there are a lot of good reasons (“Why Cloud Lock-in is a Bad Idea“) to avoid vendor lock-in as a principle. Many times, this is one of the first requirements of those enterprises that everyone is trying to attract into the cloud.

Deploying the complete application toolkit

Imagine there could be a way to replicate those services onto another cloud provider by building them up from ground up on top of some virtual servers. Imagine this could be done by a management layer, on demand, on your cloud infrastructure of choice. Imagine you could consume and control those services using always the same API. That would enable your application to be deployed in a consistent manner across multiple clouds, exclusively relying on the possibility to spin up some virtual servers, which you can find in every cloud infrastructure provider.

This is what Tapp is about. And the advantages of doing that are not trivial, these include:

1. Independency, consistency and compatibility

This is the obvious one. For instance, a user can click a button to deploy an application on Rackspace and another button to deploy a DNS manager and a load balancer. These two would provide an API that is directly integrated into the control panel and therefore consumable as-a-service. Now, the exact same thing can be also done on Amazon, Azure, Joyent or any other supported provider, obtaining the exact same result. Cloud providers became suddenly compatible.

2. Extra geographical reach

Let’s say you like Joyent but you want to deploy your application closer to a part of your user base that lives where Joyent doesn’t have a data center. But look, Amazon has one there and, despite you don’t like its pricing, you’re ready to make an exception to gain some latency advantages to serve your user base. If your application is using some of the Joyent proprietary tools, it would be extremely difficult to replicate it on Amazon. Instead, if you could deploy the whole toolkit using just some EC2 instances, then it all becomes possible.

3. Software-as-a-(single)-tenant

If multi-tenancy has been considered as a key point of Cloud Computing, I started to believe that maybe as long as an end user can consume an application as-a-service, who cares if it’s multi-tenant or single-tenant.

If you can deploy a database in a few clicks and have your connector as a result, does it really matter if this database is also hosting other customers or not? Actually, single-tenancy would become the preferred option1 as he would not have to be worried about isolation from other customers, noisy neighbors, et al. Tony Lucas (@tonylucas) wrote about this before on the Flexiant blog and I think he’s spot on, there is a “third” way and that’s what I think it’s going mainstream.

The Tapp’s way

The Tapp technology platform was built to provide all of that. A large set of application-centric tools, features and functions2 that can be deployed across multiple clouds and consumed as-a-service.

Of course it’s not just about tools. It’s also about the application core, whatever it is. The Tapp technology solves also that consistency problem by pushing the application deployment and configuration into some Chef recipes, as opposed to cloud provider-specific OS images or templates3. Every time you run those recipes you get the same result, in any cloud provider. In fact, to deploy your application you’ll just need the availability of vanilla OS images, like Ubuntu 14.04 or Windows 2012 R2 that, honestly, are offered by any cloud provider.

All those end users who want to deploy applications without feeling locked in a specific providers, today had only one way of doing it: DIY (“do-it-yourself”). They would have to maintain and operate OS images, load balancers, DNS servers, monitors, auto-scalers, etc. That’s a burden that, most of the time, they’re not ready to take. They don’t want to spend time deploying all those services that end up being all the same, all the time. Tapp takes away that burden from them. It deploys applications and service toolkits in an automated fashion and provides users just with the API to control them. And this API is consistent, independently from the chosen cloud provider. This is the key value that, I believe, will prevent developers from going straight to the source.

1. Multi-tenancy would be the preferred option for the Service Provider because this would translate into economies of scale. However, economies of scale often obtain cost optimisation and end user price reduction and, therefore, it can be considered an indirect advantage for end customers as well.↩

2. Tapp features include: application blueprinting with Chef, geo-DNS management and load balancing, networking load balancing, auto-scaling based on application performance, application monitoring, object storage and FDN (file delivery network).↩

3. It worths mentioning that pushing the deployment of application into configuration management tools like Chef or Puppet significantly affects the deployment time. That’s why it’s strongly advised to find the optimal balance between what is built-in the OS image and what is left to the configuration management tool.↩

My thoughts on the Inktank acquisition

By Marco Meinardi in startups 0 Comment

Following the news today regarding the acquisition of Inktank by Red Hat, lots of people – me included – started to wonder how would this potentially conflict with the Gluster acquisition completed by Red Hat itself nearly two years ago. Twitter has been hot all through the day on this topic and, as one would imagine, the two companies tried to give specific explanations on how Ceph and GlusterFS are actually complementary. I’m not a GlusterFS expert but I did attend recently an exciting Ceph training course and I have some doubts on what has been said. As I see lots of overlaps between the two, the truth could simply be the failure of GlusterFS to gain traction in cloud infrastructures implementations.

First off, I’d like to congratulate all the folks at Inktank for this awesome result. And not only because they’re partnering with Flexiant, the company I work for, or because some of them are former colleagues of mine, but because they’ve successfully managed to demonstrate how innovation can be still delivered in areas like IT infrastructures, that are typically considered as heavily commoditised.

A blog by Jeff Darcy (@Obdurodon) published today went just through the comparison of the architectures, the approaches and how that the two projects could actually borrow stuff from each other. But what was stated more clearly on Twitter on their positioning is the following:

Ok then Red Hat is gonna promote GlusterFS for POSIX-compliant distributed file systems and Ceph for distributed object and block store? Really? What if a company wants a combination of the three? Are they going to roll out two separate physical infrastructures with incompatible architectures? How about the famous TCO optimisation?

If you think about it, a file system, a block store or an object store are simply three different interfaces to consume the same type of resource: data storage. For this reason, I believe that Ceph’s approach of a unified layer underneath (RADOS) and the different interface gateways (FS, block and S3-compatible object store) is the exact right approach to providing a truly scalable, resilient storage system that can be consumed through different APIs. Now it’s also true that CephFS is not a mature technology at all but if I had to pick one to concentrate my storage development investments in the future, I’d pick Ceph.

When Red Hat acquired Gluster two years ago, the company was still betting its entire cloud orchestration strategy on CloudForms (based on Deltacloud) but then OpenStack became so popular that Red Hat, leader in anything open-source, had to commit to that. Today OpenStack counts quite a few installations with Ceph as storage backend, probably more than those with GlusterFS, and I believe this is the real reason behind the acquisition.

That said, I find this an extremely smart move, given that Red Hat now has to compete against all those hundreds of companies providing OpenStack support and consulting services. Owning the technology behind one of the most popular storage implementations could be a real way to differentiate from the competition. However, I still wonder if this is enough in order to stand out from the OpenStack consulting crowd. Of course Red Hat is a rock solid company with a brand, a history and reputation that scares off most competitors, but that’s nothing if not coupled with a high pace in delivering technology innovation.