Recently, BlueLock’s Brandon Jeffress and I visited Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana to take a look at how cloud computing is being used, or could be used, in the classroom environment. Jeffress, alum of Anderson, arranged for us to meet with Professor Charles Koontz, head of the Information Technology department there. After a tour of the facilities, we sat down with Professor Koontz to discuss the role of virtualization in modern college IT training.


You can’t open a news feed today without reading something about cloud computing, virtualization, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS), so Brandon and I were surprised to learn that these topics are all but absent from the modern college IT major’s curriculum. Professor Koontz explained that colleges follow the guidelines of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) which sets standards for the curriculum of IT majors in order to ensure that graduates possess the appropriate body of knowledge upon entering the working world. Cloud computing, it seems, has simply exploded onto the business scene so quickly that education has not been able to keep up. Curriculum changes take time, and so it is left up to the proactive student to engage with these expanding fields through their own research and internships. 

Brandon and I weren’t satisfied with that. Even for the most proactive students, internships and independent exploration cannot compare to the engagement one gets with a project under the direction of a professor. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to introduce students to virtualization through a short classroom tutorial, allowing them to interact with the topics they were reading about in the news through actual hands-on experience? 

      
Professor Koontz suggested that the IT major’s senior capstone class might be a great place to start. He invited Brandon to come and teach a day’s class on Cloud Computing, the advantages of cloud hosting, and his role at BlueLock this fall. Brandon agreed that even an introductory level class might really help to give the students some clarity around the whirlwind of topics referred to as “cloud,” including: Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). 

Additionally, Brandon suggested that the advantages of cloud computing could work in the students advantage when it comes to getting hands-on experience in managing environments. Before virtualization, it would have been impossible for an individual student to practice managing their own multiple-server environment. Even just three servers would have cost thousands of dollars in years past. But now, with virtualization, it takes just a few minutes to spin up three new VMs. If a college were to leverage virtualization in its classroom, students could manage their own multi-server environment in the cloud with ease. The student could control everything from creation of the VMs to their retirement, giving them great experience in one of the hottest fields in IT.

Professor Koontz believes such a program would be a great addition to a student’s education and would be willing to experiment with such a program at Anderson. He also recommended we investigate other local universities, including Indiana University, IUPUI, Ball State, Purdue University, and The University of Indianapolis. Together these schools could work to build a standard curriculum and pool their resources to implement this short tutorial series which might give Indiana’s recent graduates a leg up as they step out of the classroom and into a very “cloudy” business world.

I saw an interesting article on multi-tenancy last week concerning this from Lori MacVittie.  In the article she writes, "Tenancy becomes more granular and, at the very bottom layer, at IaaS, you’ll find that the tenant is actually an application and that each one has its own unique set of operational and infrastructure needs. Two applications, even though deployed by the same organization, may have a completely different – and sometimes image conflicting – set of parameters under which it must be deployed, secured, delivered, and managed."

Many times multi-tenancy is tied in the cloud computing world is tied more closely with technical architecture considerations than it is the business drivers behind how applications are deployed.  In order to reap the advantages of cloud computing, though, it's important to understand not just the technical complexity of deploying an application in a cloud hosting environment but also what the potential benefits and/or challenges of that deployment will be as it relates to the business impact.  When choosing candidates for the cloud, you must understand and base your decision on both.

There's some debate these days about whether or not you must be utilizing virtualization technology to be considered a true cloud computing solution.  Some argue that cloud computing is merely a paradigm and not a prescribed set of technologies; that while the advantages of virtualization are great you don't need virtualization to enjoy the advantages of cloud computing.  Just like I'm not convinced that one model fits all when it comes to cloud computing, I'm also not convinced that you have to be running a workload in a virtual machine for it to be considered to be "in the cloud".  At the core of it, cloud computing is just a sophisticated form of outsourcing all or a part of your IT infrastructure.  Instead of building your own datacenter or bying your own systems and software and managing it all yourself, you get along using someone else's datacenter.  Or someone else's systems and software.  Or someone else's people.

So while Cloud Computing <> Virtualization, VMs are the way that companies like BlueLock make infrastructure as a service and cloud computing a reality.  You can do managed hosting without virtualization, but the economies of scale and the ability to decouple compute capacity from the underlying hardware that virtualization provides are what makes infrastrure "convenient", "on-demand" and "elastic" - thereby making elevating it from mere managed hosting to "cloud hosting".  John Considine wrote a post on CloudSwitch's blog title, "Do VMs Still Matter in the Cloud".  It's worth reading to understand one perspective of what virtualization and cloud computing do probably deserve to be joined at the hip.

Jeff Vance wrote a great article entitled, "Top 10 Reasons Cloud Computing Deployments Fail" which was published last week on the Datamation site.  As I deal mainly with the technical challenges and questions that prospects have when considering cloud computing, I found it interesting that only one of the top 10 reasons provided had anything to do with technology.

The advantages of cloud computing are obvious to most people, but since many times it's the technical folks (like me!) evaluating providers and making recommendations it's easy to get buried in the bits and bytes and lose sight of the biggest issues when looking at cloud computing providers.  Whatever you do, though, don't get caught "failing to get off the sidelines".

Last week I attended Softletter's SaaS University in Washington, D.C.  It was a great event aimed at helping SaaS companies learn how to better market, sell and deliver their cloud computing solutions using the Software-as-a-Service model.  BlueLock was asked to deliver a session on the infrastructure choices that SaaS companies face when deciding how to host their application. 

The numbers from the 2010 Softletter SaaS Survey revealed that SaaS companies have many infrastructure choices to make, from highly virtualized (Cloud) server farms to highly managed service systems and many variants in between. My session analyzed the choices available to SaaS providers and and gave some realistic numbers, checklists, and scenarios that hopefully helped them make the best choice for their operations and peace of mind.  Infrastructure As A Service offerings can be a great benefits to SaaS companies in that they can help them move opex expenses to capex expenses, lower their overall costs, align their expenses with revenues, improve their speed-to-market and provide a competitive advantage.

Here's a link to the PPT and the presentation on SlideShare.

At a recent event here in Indianapolis, also known as "Sili-corn Valley" to some, a friendly attendee named Kay submitted this question: "How can cloud computing be an advantage to a startup business?"

Let's start with the basics. What is cloud computing? According to the NIST Cloud Computing Project, cloud computing is "a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction." Yes, there are lots of definitions of cloud computing out there, but this one is very suitable and widely accepted.

Now, what constitutes a startup? Startup companies can come in all forms, including those that are simply life-style companies, but the phrase "startup company" is often associated with high growth, technology oriented companies. Investors are generally most attracted to those new companies distinguished by their risk/reward profile and scalability. That is, they have lower bootstrapping costs, higher risk, and higher potential return on investment. Successful startups are typically more scalable than an established business, in the sense that they can potentially grow rapidly with limited investment of capital, labor or land. - via Wikipedia.

Now, let's talk about that last line about successful startups. Successful startups need to be scalable, with the ability to grow rapidly with limited investment in capital, labor or land. We are beginning to get the heart of our friend Kay's questions. Cloud computing sets startups up for those core abilities to control their investments (and keep them "limited").

The major benefits of cloud computing are:

• Limit upfront capital costs - shifting infrastructure costs from capex to opex
• Better ability to match revenue with expenses - you pay for the resources you use, which for most companies equates to how much traffic and revenue they are bringing in the door
• Ability to scale on demand - scale resources up and down as needed, this allows for rapid growth
• Get to market quicker - the cloud enables companies to get up and running more quickly due to rapid provisioning and infrastructure experts doing what they do best
• Spend precious labor costs on people who will better your core business and applications rather than people who must run the infrastructure (we do that for you)
• No need to spend time and money housing, powering and cooling the infrastructure (this just reinforces the startup comment about the ability to grow rapidly with limited investment in capital or land, we've already discussed people)

Check out how DECA Financial Services (a startup) slashed 91% of their first-year infrastructure costs with the BlueLock Cloud.

For more info, check out BlueLock's Advantages of Cloud Computing Blog.

At the Purdue Innovation Summit last week Ruth Nickolich submitted a great question to the BlueLock team: What are the advantages of cloud computing?

This is a question that has been asked, and answered many times and in many ways. From the BlueLock perspective, the major advantages of cloud computing are as follows:

• The real advantage of Cloud Computing, especially when using an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering which provides managed services as part of the solution, is that you're saving on more than just communications, power, cooling and facilities.  You're moving hardware and (potentially) software costs to the service provider as well as the most expensive part, the staff-related costs.  - via Bob Roudebush
• While security is a major concern when it comes to cloud computing, looking at a move to the cloud not only draws attention to the security measures in the cloud, but also the security measures you are taking in house. How do they measure up? A lot of BlueLock clients get better security from the cloud than in-house. - via Alicia Gaba
• Cloud Computing allows you to shift capital-intensive infrastructure costs to operating expenses, which can save your organization thousands of dollars in the long run. Check out how DECA Financial cut 91% of their infrastructure costs in the first year alone
• Better matching of revenue to expenses
• Rapid provisioning and speed to market
• Competitive advantage - they are able to spend IT time on their application and core business drivers rather than the day-to-day worries of managing the infrastructure

Still looking for more? Check out BlueLock's "Advantages of Cloud Computing" Blog.

Recently the swell folks at The Register commented on AWS' latest cluster computing initiative centered around High Performance Computing. In a nutshell this differs from other EC2 instances by providing dedicated servers with two 2.93 GHz, quad-core Xeon X5570s and 23 GB of memory attached to a 10Gb switching layer. Previously you didn't have dedicated hardware... you floated in a pool of resources, hoping that today would be a good day. While the resulting performance gains from dedicated hardware may be significant over the floating-in-the-sea approach, in the end you are just getting a higher performance infrastructure and not a high performance infrastructure.

The annoncements and analysis made me chuckle a bit. For BlueLock to drop another slew of 144 GB blades into a chassis is standard operating procedure. Does that make us HPC as well? For us private clouds and dedicated hardware has always been the order of the day. I find it very telling that the decisions BlueLock made years ago are just now emerging as popular trends for Infrastructure as a Service today.

When evaluating managed IT hosting or cloud hosting providers, it's always good to look at performance not just in terms of "small," "medium" or "large." It's not even how much compute or memory you throw at the problem. Network and filesystem I/O (especially for cloud computing) is a huge factor in overall cluster performance, and one really needs to be at peace with your physical hardware to truly take advantage of your virtual solutions.

The BlueLock vCloud Express Cloud Monkeys Use Case contest begins today!

Former, current and new BlueLock vCloud Express Beta users will compete for these prizes:

• The first ten submissions will receive a stuffed cloud monkey
  
• The top five finalists will receive a FlipCam which they will use (and keep!) to create a recognition video for the application to compete for the Grand Prize - an Apple iPad!
  
• The Grand Prize winner will receive the engraved Apple iPad!

Open for submissions by current, former and new Beta users, the contest runs from June 16 – September 6 and looks to surface the most innovative use cases of BlueLock’s vCloud Express.

During the 12-week contest, BlueLock vCloud Express developers enter by filling out a simple questionnaire on the BlueLock Web site between June 16 and July 7 2010 that includes a description of the BlueLock vCloud Express use case and why it deserves to win. Participants can promote their own use case through Twitter and other social media outlets. Submissions will be voted on by an open community of voters and judged by BlueLock and VMware on cloud applicability, creativity/innovation, time savings and cost savings to select the top five use cases. The first ten submissions will receive a BlueLock “Cloud Monkey” stuffed animal and the five finalists will receive FlipCams with the option to document their use cases in a two minute “Recognition Video.” Finalists who submit Recognition Videos will then be judged by BlueLock and VMware for the Grand Prize, with the winner receiving an engraved Apple iPad.

“The functionality of BlueLock vCloud Express has proven to be unique and of value to our clients, driving us to design some of the same features into our other solutions within BlueLock CloudSuite,” said Kim Graham Lee, Chief Marketing Officer, BlueLock. “We are excited to not only learn more about how developers have been using vCloud Express, but to also highlight the most unique and interesting use cases.”

“As a top VMware vCloud service provider partner, BlueLock has been able to help shape vCloud Express as it continues to demonstrate that they are ahead of the curve in understanding their clients’ needs in the evolving cloud computing space,” said Mathew Lodge, Senior Director-Cloud Product Marketing, VMware. “We are looking forward to learning about how beta users have taken advantage of the dynamic combination of the industry-leading VMware platform and BlueLock’s secure and reliable cloud hosting and infrastructure expertise.”

BlueLock vCloud Express is a reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure solution that ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized™ services worldwide. The technology allows users to create virtual machines as needed and add compute capacity via an online interface. Users pay only for the compute and storage space they use. Since being selected by VMware as one of only five companies worldwide to offer vCloud Express and launching in September 2009, BlueLock has reached 1,100 beta users of the product.

Participants can be past, current or new BlueLock vCloud Express beta users and can submit more than one application. For additional contest details, visit www.bluelock.com.

Budding Buddists are most likely familiar with the idea that "The root of all suffering is desire." When it comes to Clould Computing Security, it's my observeration that at the root of all security concerns about moving data and applications to the cloud is control.

Kevin Fogarty at CIO.com wrote an interesting article last month titled "Cloud Computing Poses Control Issues for IT".  In the reality show that is Cloud Computing, "Security" plays a convincing foil to the main character known as "Advantages of Cloud Computing" but rarely, if ever, does the decision come down to which encryption algorithm you're using for sensitive data or whether or not you're using an IPSec or a SSL VPN solution.

For us geeks there are always heated, emotional debates about which technology has more speeds and feeds or which is a more elegant solution to a problem.  However, most IT managers and architects are willing to accept the argument that large service providers are able to acheive economies of scale as well as economies of security by making large investments in security technology and even larger investments in good security professionals then spreading those costs over their client base.  The real issue is whether or not the organization is willing to give up control of data and systems to another company.

Imagine on one end of the control spectrum Dedicated Private IT where the organization controls the entire stack - Data, App/Services, VM/Server and Storage.  The only portion of the stack which the organization has to share control of is the Network - because few organizations have the ability to provide the connectivity available from private telecommunications companies.  On the other end of that spectrum is Public SaaS solutions where the organization shares control of the Data (they decide what can go into the cloud and what can't) but the App/Services, VM/Server, Storage and Network is under the sole control of the service provider.  Even if the service provider is far more qualified to care for the outsourced service than the IT organization itself, the company's executive team may not be willing to give up that much control.

Public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions may provide the middle ground in this control struggle necessary for companies to be willing to start ot move to Cloud Computing.  Most Public IaaS models place the responsibility for managing the Network, Storage and Server portions of the computing stack; the company still maintains access and administrative control to the VM, App/Services and the Data.  This allows organizations to rely on service providers to manage the security of the underlying infrastructure but makes it easy to lock out the service provider and maintain control of everything else.

Track temperature was hovering around 120 degrees Fahrenheit, the crowd of almost 300,000 race fans were settled into their sets with stocked cooler chests, and on Memorial Day weekend, Americans did what they do best, they evoked their freedom of speech; they broke into a chant… U.S.A. - U.S.A. – U.S.A…

On one of the hottest Memorial Day’s in history, you could not pay me enough to leave the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but for a fleeting moment I did think about work and how cool our server room is. When giving site tours to prospective clients and explaining the benefits of virtualization, I recalled stepping into the fully enclosed concrete room and getting hit with a blast of arctic air – man what a feeling.  In a blink of an eye, all thoughts of work past by me at 224 mph, like a burst of light, as 33 Indy Cars roared through turn one.

Now that I am back in the office and out of the heat, I think back to Sunday and wonder how many business owners lost their servers on Memorial Day weekend due to lack of cooling.  I have been in several prospective companies that have server rooms with little or no cooling and the concept of a server room is simply a new designation for an old broom closet.  If your IT business plan does not call for raised floors, integrated connection of chillers, compressors, and air handlers, ask yourself this – Have I made the best investment in owning and operating my own equipment vs exploring the advantages of cloud computing?  Ask yourself, when my service contract is up or my servers need upgrading, should I consider outsourcing to a VMware infrastructure company like BlueLock or make the financial investment on a total data center upgrade? These are not easy questions to answer and may involve stepping outside the comfort of what many of us have done for twenty of thirty years.

For more information on BlueLock, visit our website or call me directly at 888-402-1980 ex. 127

I attended my first CloudCamp event last night as a BlueLock employee.  I am thankful to have been about to participate in plenty of good discussions around cloud hosting, the advantages of virtualization and the benefits of cloud computing.  During the Cloud Computing Security unconference session there were a lot of great ideas shared - one in particular from a CISSP (security) type who does security and compliance audits of companies. 

If you're into IT security and compliance, you should really check out the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).  They have a library of publications on a variety of topics - you can see them all here.  You can narrow your search to specific topic areas like Computer Security, Information Technology or even Disaster Resilience.  It's certainly worth bookmarking.

I don't believe anyone really thinks all enterprise data centers will begin rushing to the clouds anytime soon (although there are a few that already have).  That's quite far-fetched.  However, that doesn't mean they won't begin testing out the waters (or the clouds). 

However, as EMC CEO Joe Tucci explained at EMC World, "IT infrastructure has gotten too complex, too inefficient, too inflexible, and too costly...You’re managing a lot more with the same or less resources.”

A recent article outlined the benefits of the enterprise data center alongside the benefits of cloud computing.

Today's data center benefits:

•  Trust
• Control
• Reliability
• Security

Cloud Computing benefits:

•  Dynamic
• Cost-efficient
• On-demand
• Flexible

“In a way, the attributes of one are the negative of the other,” Tucci said.

The question is - how does the enterprise access the best of both worlds?

The answer is simple, and it probably the same if you were to ask someone from EMC, VMware or BlueLock.  The answer is private cloud computing. 

What is private cloud computing? It refers to what some call internal cloud computing and describes an offering that emulates cloud computing on private networks which allows companies to access the advantages of cloud computing without the pitfalls, such as data security, corporate governance and reliability concerns.  Companies must still buy, build and manage the cloud, which isn't the case in the public cloud realm, but there are still many benefits.  One of those benefits that BlueLock clients have accessed, is the ability to connect their private cloud to the public cloud for bursting and/or disaster recovery.

Learn more about private cloud computing today.

I recently wrote a post about "What cloud computing means to you," in which I described some of the value our clients have gotten from the cloud.  

What are our clients getting?

• The ability to transition costs from Capex to Opex
• The opportunity to lower overall IT Infrastructure costs
• Better matching of revenue to expenses
• Rapid provisioning and speed to market
• Competitive advantage

That was a basic generalization of the broader values from the BlueLock Cloud. Now let's look at a real-world example of the advantages of cloud computing with BlueLock.  The client I'm referring to has 30 servers in our cloud.  They were able to:

• Avoid capital costs totaling $150-300K
• Improve margin by 35%
• Add a new server for a client within 24 hours
• Beat their own competitors on agility and costs

Are those numbers compelling to you?

Still not sure what cloud hosting might be able to do for your business? Contact the BlueLock sales team for a business assessment to look at what we can do for you.

Cloud Computing means many things to many people.  It excites, motivates, and even scares some.  But what does it mean to you?

The advantages of cloud computing have been touted again and again - from flexibility, speed, versatility, convenience, and cost effective to green, secure and scalable.  But what makes cloud computing so interesting is that everyone has different thoughts and views around what it really does for them and means to them.

So first things first, what is cloud computing? At BlueLock we describe it in terms of 5 major things: on demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured service.  It is provided in three different service models: software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). (BlueLock does IaaS.)

But what's the real value of the cloud? These are the major values our clients have seen:

• Transitioning IT infrastructure costs from Capex to Opex
• Opportunity to lower overall costs
• Better match expenses to revenue
• Rapid provisioning (speed to market)
• Competitive advantage

 But again, I must ask, what does cloud computing mean to you?  

 

There's no shortage of comparisons between cloud computing and electricity.

And, for the most part, I like the comparison between cloud computing and electricity because I think it's easy for people to "get". It relates datacenter computing to something more common - like toasters. (Though, come to think of it, I've seen toasters these days as complicated as blade chassis and FC SAN storage!) What I think is important to point out, though, is that most comparisons between cloud computing and electricity (as a utility) stop here. To understand if/when/how cloud computing becomes a commodity, it's important to continue the comparison. Let's take a little stroll down memory lane...

It wasn't enough to discover electricity for it to become a commodity. Edison's contribution of the creation of a power generation system is what got things rolling, but it was Edison's arch rival Nikola Tesla and his idea of Alternating Current (AC) which made widespread distribution of electricity and eventually commoditization of electricity possible. From Wikipedia:

AC replaced DC in most instances of generation and power distribution, enormously extending the range and improving the efficiency of power distribution. Though widespread use of DC ultimately lost favor for distribution, it exists today primarily in long-distance high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission systems. Low voltage DC distribution continued to be used in high density downtown areas for many years but was eventually replaced by AC low-voltage network distribution in many of them. DC had the advantage that large battery banks could maintain continuous power through brief interruptions of the electric supply from generators and the transmission system. Utilities such as Commonwealth Edison in Chicago had rotary converters or motor-generator sets, which could change DC to AC and AC to various frequencies in the early to mid-20th century. Utilities supplied rectifiers to convert the low voltage AC to DC for such DC loads as elevators, fans and pumps. There were still 1,600 DC customers in downtown New York City as of 2005, and service was finally discontinued only on November 14, 2007.

So it wasn't until we figured out a way to get gobs of power across long distances efficiently that electricity really became a commodity. Sound familiar? Might one draw a parallel between that and the bandwidth predicament that most potential cloud customers find themselves facing today? Organizations today do backup and recover to the cloud in the event of a catastrophe and others even run their production workloads in datacenters far, far away.

If only it were easier to move large amounts of data across current WAN connections and that WAN connectivity didn't cost so dearly, many more would follow suit. So, until the TCPIP equivalent of Mr. Tesla comes along we shall continue to need to find a way around this potential roadblock for IT organizations. This bodes well for regionalized cloud computing infrastructures where it's relatively inexpensive to get high speed connectivity across town or to the next state. Uncannily analogous to the regional power plants that existed in Edison's time.

Another challenge is standardization and portability. Electricity works as a commodity because we eventually standardized on how it was distributed and how devices consumed it. I can take my toaster and plug it into any 110v outlet in the US and I will get...well...toast. Provided that I have bread available. When companies can easily move workloads and data to the Cloud and between cloud computing providers then I think we'll have a true commodity.

There are many obvious advantages to cloud computing, but is managed cloud computing right for you? Self-service may be all you need to get started.

In this episode Whiteboard Wednesday, Jake and I discuss a number of cloud computing companies and the differences between self-service and the fully-managed cloud.

What do you think? What type of cloud are you using?

Recently I had the pleasure of representing BlueLock at a reception for Mira Award finalists. Yes, this cloud computing company is up for the prestigious Gazelle Award. At the event, each finalist company was asked to provide a 60-second elevator pitch on what it does. Since our own branding work is still in progress (I hired a branding firm to help us), I gave it my best shot.

I began by first describing BlueLock as a cloud hosting company and referenced that we have spent our lifetime in the cloud, even before anyone knew what cloud computing was. Deciding to engage the audience, I asked a lawyer friend of mine to share what the cloud is. His response was, "Kim, everyone knows what the cloud is" and he pointed out the window.

Since I haven't yet come up with a simple definition of cloud computing that my own mother will understand, I have found it helpful to use an analogy. (Thank you, Nicholas Carr who wrote The Big Switch!) I begin by sharing that years ago companies had to generate their own electrical power and spent considerable manpower and other resources doing that. Their ability to generate that power served as a competitive advantage at least for a window of time. Later on companies were then able to simply plug in to the electric grid, access as much electricity as they needed at any given time, and paid for only what they use.

The same is true for IT today and that is what the cloud is about. At BlueLock, we help companies focus on and grow their businesses by providing them with the amount of IT infrastructure they need, when they need it, and charge them for what they use. And this can all be done in minutes via the Web. This serves as a tremendous value to our clients who would prefer to spend their time and resources on growth and revenue generating activities, not servers and other technology infrastructure.

I am still on a mission to come up with that simple and clear definition of the cloud.  Any and all input is welcome! For now, the electricity analogy seems to work. My mother gets it. What will also work for me is winning the Mira Award on May 15.

Stay plugged in for that!

In this series of posts (see Part I and Part II), I'm looking at moving applications to the cloud and the scalability concerns around that.  The interesting thing to notice is that these problems aren’t unique to cloud computing at all.  

On one end of the spectrum, the promise of cloud computing and its expansive computing capacities has led customers to believe that simply moving their application to the cloud is going to solve all of these problems.  On the other end, clients who have very important applications running on-premise are concerned that when they move their applications to the cloud they’ll have to share all that wonderful computational goodness with hundreds or thousands of other clients and their applications’ performance will suffer.  Regardless of which perspective you may be coming from, there are two things to focus on when looking at moving to the cloud.  

In the last post, I looked at the first issue - raw computing capacity.  A second thing to consider is the application architecture itself.  As Mr. Golden highlighted in the CIO.com article, one could even argue that this is more important than the scalability of the underlying cloud computing platform.  The reason is that there is always a limit to the hardware (virtual or physical) that can be thrown at an application and a lot of applications aren’t even designed from the beginning to scale in this manner.  With VMware a maximum of either 4 or 8 vCPUs (virtual CPUs) can be assigned to a VM depending on the version of ESX being used.  There are even good reasons why arbitrarily assigning the max number of vCPUs to a VM isn’t the best course of action.  

More importantly, if the application (and underlying OS) wasn’t built to support SMP and multi-threading, adding vCPUs will have no effect whatsoever.  If scalability is a concern, ensure that all of the applications components can take advantage of a large number of CPUs and can address > 4GB of RAM.  This is known as a “scale-up” model.

In highly scalable application deployments, though, a “scale-out” model is usually more appropriate.  Applications that are designed to spread load across two or more hosts allow you to add compute capacity simply by adding additional servers.  On the back-end, adding additional database servers and using horizontal scaling relational database tricks like database shards allow you to remedy DB bottlenecks without implementing huge SMP systems to accommodate query load.  The added benefit of this “scale-out” approach is that you get higher availability of the application for free.  You can take one application server offline for maintenance while not affecting the other servers in the application farm.  In addition, if one application instance experiences a crash other users on other instances of the application continue to function normally.

In the on-premise, physical server world both the “scale-up” and “scale-out” approaches I’ve discussed was usually very costly.  4-way or 8-way servers with gobs and gobs of RAM are an expensive way to grow vertically and add performance and though smaller systems used as part of a horizontal scaling approach are less expensive initially, they add a whole new level of complexity and expense in terms of ongoing maintenance.   What’s more, during non-peak times all this compute infrastructure sat largely un(der)-utilized. 

What is exciting about cloud computing IaaS – especially the 100% virtualized IaaS which BlueLock has built – is that this computing model is perfect for these kinds of scalability needs.  For scale-up applications, clients can start small and grow into things.  For scale-out applications, new VMs (running additional instances of the application) can be added and managed much more easily than they can in the on-premise world.

For more info on BlueLock or scaling your application in the cloud, contact us.