Creating a Public Cloud
Experience In-House
A white paper by David S. Linthicum
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Creating a Public Cloud Experience In-House
Executive Summary
The cloud has revolutionized the way we build IT systems within enterprises. Indeed, enterprise IT’s
goal since the inception of cloud computing has been to replicate the power of cloud computing within
their own data centers.
The trouble is that cloud computing systems were built net-new, which meant they could start from
scratch and thus be more innovative with the use of cloud-based resources using the most modern
technology and approaches available. Enterprises don’t have the same luxury. Decades of enterprise
hardware and software purchases exist at different levels of maturation, and those structures must
also support mission-critical systems in operations.
However, things are changing. New technology now provides enterprises with the public cloud experience, which includes:
• Elastic use of compute resources, such as storage and compute.
• Metered resource charge-back, meaning you only pay for the resources you use.
• Auto- and self-provisioning; you can spin up and spin down resources as you need them.
• Tight integration with new approaches and technologies, such as DevOps and the Internet
of Things (IoT).
• Business agility, which is perhaps the most valuable aspect of using the clouds, means that
you can quickly change applications and resources with almost no impact on operations.
In this paper, we’ll take you through the steps to leverage the value of public clouds on-premises. We’ll
include a path to leverage cloud concepts in ways that you may not have known about, where available
new technologies support the concept of software-defined data centers (SDDC).
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Creating a Public Cloud Experience In-House
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The public cloud experience
The data is overwhelming around the adoption of public clouds. By 2018, IDC forecasts that public
cloud spending will more than double to $127.5 billion. This forecast is broken down as follows: $82.7
billion in SaaS spending, $24.6 billion for IaaS and $20.3 billion in PaaS expenditures.1
What caused the shift to public clouds? There are 5 primary strategic drivers:
1. Purchasers believe the current cost of traditional enterprise software and infrastructure (storage
and compute) is disproportionate to the value that it creates.
2. In these budget-conscious times, there is intense pressure to reduce the cost of acquisition and
maintenance of software and hardware solutions (the on-going support and maintenance of solu
tions can often be four times the original capital cost).
3. Organizations strive to reduce risk, and want a far more tangible relationship between software
and hardware benefits and costs.
4. The drive for reduced risk demands a much greater predictability of the running costs of the
orga nization’s software solutions.
5. The value of solutions is no longer determined by the functionality available, but by the feelings
and experiences of the users in the way that they use and interact with the solution.In fact, most
organizations only use a small subset of the functions available in their software products.
Tactical advantages are easier to define:
• Cloud uses a pay-as-you-go model to access a variety of IT resources, and this allows enterprises
to only consume the needed resources.
• On-demand access to resources at a low cost allows leverage of resources when and where
needed, at a fraction of the cost of owning hardware and software.
• Resource elasticity meets varying demands, allowing expansion and contraction of resources
as needed.
• Colocation of computation and data enables large-scale data analytics. Systems that were
once out of reach are now affordable.
One of the primary drivers of cloud computing is the value of business agility. Business agility is the
ability to make quick changes in a business to meet changing business needs. Examples would include
the ability to add a new product line, expand into new markets, or provide customer visibility into
product shipments.
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Source: Forecasts Call For Cloud Burst Through 2018.
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Creating a Public Cloud Experience In-House
Public cloud computing provides business agility. The ability to provision and scale a system is built
into the architecture of most public clouds. If there is a business need for a new system, it’s just a
matter of provisioning the resources required from public cloud providers. This process is much
quicker and easier than purchasing, configuring, and hosting your own hardware and software assets.
The value of business agility really depends upon the type of business. Those in the healthcare and
finance verticals obtain a great deal of value from agile platforms, such as cloud-based platforms. Verticals with relatively static business processes, such as many manufacturing organizations, may not
realize as much value around the use of cloud computing.
Moving forward, public clouds are becoming much more feature rich, with additional capabilities that
meet or exceed what enterprises currently run in-house. This lead to public clouds being the desired
platform of choice, although enterprises may be limited as to aspects of the public clouds that they
can actually use.
There are different stages of maturation when moving to the cloud. Figure 1 shows how enterprises
move from “Preparing for the Cloud,” using virtualization to drive initial value. However, you must
move to automation, and orchestration to gain the business advantage of agility to drive the most
value.
Orchestrate
• Lower cost
• Self provisioning
• Automated governance
• Adaptable security
• Improved user experience
• Service oriented
Automate
Virtualize
Combine
Standardize
• Dynamically aligned to the business
• Self adapting
• Automated governance and security
• Enhanced business agility
• Lower cost
• Delayed provisioning
• Imrpoved resource management and utilization
• Moving to centralized control
• Initial use of services
• Normalize assets
• Increase efficiency
• Improve management
• Improve governance (non-automated)
• Lower cost
• Consistent use of technology
• Enhanced performance
• Reduced complexity
• Use of VM’S
Time
Figure 1: When considering cloud, enterprises are at different levels of maturation.
You need to understand where you are, and where you need to go.
In the remainder of this paper, we’ll look at how to replicate the value and experience of public clouds
on private cloud platforms. In other words, we’ll look at how to leverage the value of public clouds in
private cloud environments that you can put to use this year.
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Creating a Public Cloud Experience In-House
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Building an on-premises private cloud
So, what are the required capabilities of on-premises private clouds that will meet your needs? A few
features to consider would be:
•
•
•
•
•
Converged compute, storage and networking with automation and management
Scale out on-demand with any size x86 servers
Openstack standard APIs delivery for operational efficiency and simplicity
Technology for smart resource provisioning and allocation
Distributed architecture with self-healing for high availability
What’s key about the items above is that they are all features that can be found in an SDDC as well as
a private cloud. In essence, you can find an analog for public cloud technology within your own data
centers, including the ability to provide elasticity, centralization, and operational efficiency.
Moreover, these systems can provide the ability to auto- and self-provision compute and storage
resources, allowing you to provision resources at the application level. The alternative is to try to
predict capacities, and attempt to align need with hardware resources. It’s a guessing game that costs
big money, since there is no way to tightly align the needs of production with hardware resources.
However, using a private cloud within an SDDC, you’re able to provide a platform that’s able to better
respond to the application and user needs.
Finally, there is the ability to support widely distributed architectures that provide self-healing capabilities, such as working around a server or storage system that’s failing. Or, working around breaks in
network services, as well as dealing with active/active data redundancy in support of business continuity.
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Creating a Public Cloud Experience In-House
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The first step is to understand your own requirements, and that means doing the up-front work.
While your own requirements will differ a bit, the following, at the very least, should be understood.
• Data properties and usage. Know where your data is, what it is, and how it’s leveraged within
applications.
• Storage properties and usage. How are files stored, when, where, and by whom?
What applications exist on, or are using which storage services?
• Security and governance services needed. What are the security systems in place, and how
do they need to exist in the to-be architecture using a private cloud and SDDC? The same with
governance services, such as service or API governance.
• Application portfolio and profiles. What applications should and need to be moved to the new
private clouds platform, and which ones should move first? Moreover, understand their links to
data as well as how users access the applications.
• Networking and other infrastructure needs. What is and will be the loads on the network, and
how will the target private cloud deal with the loads? There are other things to consider as well,
including power management, monitoring and management consoles, and other aspects that exist
within your premises.
Figure 2 describes the major steps, and sub-steps, that enterprises must go through when moving to
a cloud.
Cloud Business Case
• Business Drivers
• Opportunities
• Risks
• ROI Model
Application Portfolio
Discovery
New Business
Services Analysis
• Application
Profiling for 2
Existing Workloads
• Future Business
Services Profiling
for 2 New Workloads
• Application
Technology
Portfolio
• Future Information
Management
Reference
Architecture
• Data Security
and Compliance
• Cloud Platform
Capabilities
• Capacity and
Growth Reqs
Business Services
Implementation
Strategy
• Application
Migration Strategy
• Capacity and Growth
Model
• Initiatives
• Service Priorization
• Interdependencies
• Business Services
and Application
Migration
Roadmap
Figure 2: There are major steps that should be followed when moving to the cloud.
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Creating a Public Cloud Experience In-House
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Architectures and solutions to consider
Once we have the requirements down, we can consider a number of meta-architectures as options
including: Private, public, and hybrid/multi.
Public has already been explored above. Private clouds provide you with more control and sometimes
better efficiency as well, if the right technology is selected and leveraged in the right ways. In other
words, you can replicate the public cloud user experience by using private cloud solutions. We’ll
address that below.
However, sometimes it makes sense to pair private clouds with public clouds, thus creating a hybrid
or multi-cloud solution. These are more complex than just private or just public clouds, but do allow
you to place different workloads on different clouds, depending upon what those workloads need to
do. For instance, placing a big data system on a public cloud for cost efficiency due to storage needs,
and having that big data system work in conjunction with systems that exist on private clouds.
As reported by TechTarget, “Cloud computing is not the answer for all companies, and confronting the
move from the cloud to a data center migration creates questions that don't always have easy
answers. Groupon, for instance, moved away from cloud computing for economic reasons. They
stated that, once a company starts to spend $200,000 to $250,000 per month in the cloud, they should
look at other options. Groupon advised companies to ‘run the numbers and talk to some data center
providers,’ adding that the numbers will vary by enterprise.”
Of course, there are many public cloud success
stories, including Netflix. They focused on delivery of a video streaming service that was more
cost effective to run on a public cloud. Indeed,
they are going so for the same reason that Groupon is running in their own data center. Netflix
ran the numbers, and, for them, the public cloud
was the most effective and efficient solution.
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Creating a Public Cloud Experience In-House
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What are the must haves when looking
for a private cloud?
So, what are the must haves when looking for private clouds solutions? There are a few key concepts
to consider.
First, ease of use. The private cloud technology must serve those in operations, as well as application
developers, and even application users. There are many dimensions to consider, including the ways
that each person views the private cloud through their own set of interfaces.
Second, cost efficiencies. How well does the private cloud do at minimizing costs? It’s important that
we run the numbers and understand the cost expectations, in terms of what we’ll spend for the
private cloud by resource, application, and user, as well as what efficiencies the private cloud will
bring.
When doing these calculations, make sure to figure in the value of agility, or the value of providing the
ability to quickly change and expand business processes. While this value is difficult to determine, you
should look at the strategic value of agility to the business. For example, what is the value of bringing
a product to market in days, rather than months or sometimes years? It typically means millions to the
bottom line.
How SDDC meets the need
Stratoscale Symphony is an example of an integrated software-defined data center (SDDC) solution
that offers enterprise IT a complete and easy-to-manage hyper-converged system. Symphony comes
ready to work out-of-the-box, with all the functionality and features required to run and operate a
private cloud environment, and it meets the features we’ve covered above. More importantly, it can
provide all of the benefits of public clouds, as a hyper-converged system, that provides cloud services
through a private cloud.
Stratoscale Symphony offers:
•
•
•
•
•
Converged compute, storage and networking with automation and management
Scale out on-demand with any size x86 servers
Openstack standard APIs delivery for operational efficiency and simplicity
Patented technology for smart resource provisioning and allocation
Distributed architecture with self-healing for high availability
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Call to action
So, what does all of this mean for your enterprise? The core message in this paper: The value of public
cloud does not necessarily need to be delivered by a public cloud. Using SDDC and converged
systems, as well as best-of-breed private cloud platforms, enterprises can provide a cost-effective
hybrid cloud alternative to public clouds for enterprises.
As cloud computing continues its growth in popularity, and public clouds become more powerful, the
use of the public cloud resources will be contraindicated by many enterprises. For those companies
that exist in this category, it’s good to know that they have powerful and effective options that will
open the door to the public cloud experience.
About Stratoscale
Stratoscale is redefining the data center, developing a hardware-agnostic, software platform converging compute, storage and networking across the rack or data center. The self-optimizing platform
automatically distributes all physical and virtual assets and workloads in real time, delivering
“rack-scale economics” to data centers of all sizes with unparalleled efficiency and operational
simplicity. Stratoscale is backed by leading investors including: Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture
Partners, Cisco, Intel and SanDisk.
For more information visit:
http://www.stratoscale.com
US Phone: +1 877 420-3244
Email: [email protected]
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