private cloud e-zine -...
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PRIVATE CLOUD e-zine
Strategies for building a private cloud
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In this issue:
q COMPLEXITY IN THE CLOUD By Lauren Horwitz
q SIX STEPS TO BUILDING A CITRIX PRIVATE CLOUD By Bill Kleyman
q DevOps: BRINGING ORDER TO THE CHAOTIC CLOUD By Roger Jennings
COMPANIES THAT ARE consider-ing private or hybrid clouds often report the vexing problem of try-ing to understand complex cloud service-level agreements (SLAs). Their terms can be difficult to parse, and service guarantees can be even tougher to ensure. In our Trends section on page 3, we unpack often-cryptic SLAs and address how a business can negotiate the most favorable terms.
If cloud contracts are confusing, the raft of smaller cloud companies cropping up every which way can make your head spin. But here’s a reality check: Not all these compa-nies are ready for enterprise-level clouds. In fact, the private/hybrid cloud market is still dominated by vendors with a track record in the hypervisor game. That means VMware with vSphere, Microsoft with Hyper-V, and Citrix Systems with XenServer. And while VMware continues to make a strong show-ing with vCloud Director, Citrix Systems’ acquisition of Cloud.com’s CloudStack in July 2011 brings vital-ity to the market and an alternative for XenServer shops.
With CloudStack, Citrix has built on its open source virtualization platform to create a relatively fully
developed cloud offering. Citrix’s portfolio isn’t as strong in cloud application development and man-agement as, say, VMware, but it can boast a more lightweight cloud platform in terms of footprint and cost—longtime weaknesses of VMware.
The first article in this issue explores Citrix’s cloud platform, which the author deems ready for enterprises, and six steps to build a Citrix cloud in your environment. If you’ve hitched your wagon to Citrix virtualization and/or the cloud, this offers brass-tacks advice on getting started.
Next, we zero in on the nascent field of DevOps, a discipline that’s emerged in response to cloud com-puting—and to the need for greater cohesion among development and operations teams. We dig into the implications of these shifts for IT departments.
And as always, check out Search-CloudComputing.com for your daily dose of news on cloud happenings. n
LAUREN HORWITZExecutive Editor Data Center and Virtualization Media Group, TechTarget Inc.
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COMPLEXITY IN THE CLOUD
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Cloud One on One
CHOOSING A CLOUD PROVIDERCompanies that are considering hybrid clouds are often put off by complex and confusing contracts. That’s not to mention user concerns about data security policies, platform interoperability and uptime guaran-tees. Companies considering hybrid clouds need a solid education in cloud service-level agreements to get the most from their cloud arrangements.
SearchCloudComputing.com sat down with virtualization writer, cloud expert and RTFM Education blogger Mike Laverick to outline some key questions to ask a provider so you don’t get stuck in a contract with unfavorable terms.
How is my data stored, and what happens if there is a data breach? There is a whole series of questions that are quite imponderable without
close discussion between you and a provider.
And much of this centers on your data. Because that is essentially what you’re doing when you put something in the cloud. It’s not just a process; it’s not just a piece of software.
So you need to ask yourself, “How is that data stored? Where is it stored? Who can access it, and is it encrypted? And if it’s only tempo-rary data, how long is it retained?” All these questions together help assess whether your data is being managed effectively.
Different tenants in the cloud are also in their own little bubbles, separate from others. The anxiety is that one business, potentially a competitor, can access my data in my bubble. But what’s less frequent-ly asked is, “Who has overall sys-tem rights in the cloud?” Because a cloud administrator often carves up the cloud and gives people the “correct” access. But the real ques-
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T R E N D S in cloud computing
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tions are “Are they trustworthy people?” and “Are they handling our data properly?” And that’s why encryption is so important to data security, making sure that only I can access the data that’s created by me.
How do contracts work? What happens if a customer wants to leave the service?There are a number of gotchas and considerations here. First is the duration of a contract. You want to be in a situation where you know that you have that service guar-anteed for a period of time up to a certain level. But at the same time, no one wants to be in a contract that lasts for decades without any
chance of renegotiation. If you need to exit your contract,
you should know whether there are fees or penalties for leaving early. And if something goes wrong, what compensation is available for a problem that’s occurred—are there any paybacks for outages? And what level of outage needs to occur before payback gets triggered? Do you need to be offline for an hour, two hours, half a day? Does the contract outline any limitations where you cannot claim damage because the event is not seen as serious enough?
And second, consider data loss and leakage. If the provider is hacked, for example, or if for unfore-seen reasons, data is lost, what is the retrievability of that data, and
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1TRENDS IN CLOUD COMPUTINGT
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CLOUD INTEROPERABILITY CONCERNSCloud users say that the mismatch between public
and private cloud APIs is problematic.
22%: VERY We use VMware, which is not compatible with many
public cloud provider APIs.
53%: SOMEWHAT IMPORTANT It’s a headache—but
doable—to match different platforms.
17%: NOT SIGNIFICANT We don’t care about the platform. We just care about the servers.
8%: NOT IMPORTANT AT ALL
N=91 I.T. MANAGERS; SOURCE: 2011 CLOUD COMPUTING ADOPTION SURVEY, TECHTARGET INC., MARCH 2011
what is the cost? If data can’t be retrieved, what compensation is there to your business?
What is your company’s history with outages, and how much uptime do you guarantee?In our industry, one thing we often talk about is five nines of uptime—that you’ll have service 99.999% of the time.
For most businesses with high levels of uptime in SLAs, when you look at the application require-ments, that level isn’t really needed. But also, very high uptimes are only achievable with certain network, storage and compute designs that are designed at a very high level of redundancy, and they are not cheap. Eventually, it means dou-bling up on equipment simply to cover the potential of an outage. So if you excessively ramp up SLA requirements, appreciate that it only results in greater price.
So the takeaway is to try to map SLAs and uptime guarantees to the application requirements. Too often, businesses want to create an SLA that is far in excess of what they need, thus costing the business more money—not saving money.
Now, consider a provider’s previ-ous track record. Beware of a pro-vider that says, “We’ve never had an outage that’s been significant enough to result in compensa-tion”—that could reflect how well
their legal team has constructed their contracts rather than the qual-ity of their service. What matters is how quickly it took a provider to discover the problem and recover the service.
If your service experiences an outage, what kind of backup and recovery services do you offer to customers? Most people would be shocked to hear that customers with VMs [vir-tual machines] in the cloud rarely have access to their own backup processes—they have to rely on the backup processes of the provider. And that means potentially being in a queue behind other customers waiting for the process to be com-pleted. And it may be part of your contract that if data loss occurs, you have to pay to get data back in a certain amount of time.
The other question to ask about disaster recovery [DR] in the cloud is how granular it is. Yes, a pro-vider may bring back your data, but what level of consistency will it have, and how granular will it be in terms of the files you recover? If it’s recovering just virtual disks from virtual machines rather than indi-vidual files, you’ll find that data loss occurred because the VMs don’t contain the data that you want to retrieve and because the recovery wasn’t done at a file-by-file level.
No business wants to be in the
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DevOps: BRINGING
ORDER TO THE
CHAOTIC CLOUD
1TRENDS IN CLOUD COMPUTINGT
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position of saying, “Ring back later” when a problem occurs. That means not only looking at alternative sys-tems internally but also looking to the vendor in the cloud and how a DR strategy can bring your virtual machines back up in another data center in another location.
It would be fair to say that DR for the cloud is still in its infancy. And the bigger question is whether what’s currently available meets your [recovery point objective] and [recovery time objective], as opposed to the objectives of the cloud provider.
Can I get customer references?Whenever I buy any service—a holiday or a new cell phone—I often
look at various portals and sites for feedback from users. That customer feedback is likely to have more impact on my decision to buy or not to buy than anything else that I will see—certainly it’s more important for me than price. There is noth-ing better than a customer that has used the service and can report on the good and the bad—and what happened during the bad.
The tricky thing is that customer testimonials may come from a com-petitor, so businesses may not want to share that information with you because of conflicts of interest. But it can be a great opportunity to find out what is really going on rather than just swallowing marketing information hook, line and sinker.
—BY LAUREN HORWITZ
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DRIVING FORCE FOR IAASAccording to respondents, the primary motivation for adopting
cloud computing is increased flexibility, not cost savings.
9%: Speed
3%: Other
47%: Flexibility
4%: Business-side request
30%: Cost
7%: Lack of in-house staff to manage infrastructure
N=156 I.T. MANAGERS; SOURCE: 2011 CLOUD COMPUTING ADOPTION SURVEY, TECHTARGET INC., MARCH 2011
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ONE ADVANTAGE OF building a pri-vate cloud with Citrix technolo-gies is that all components can be deployed as virtual instances. So you can launch all the components in a ready-to-go virtual environment that uses hardware in a data center or hosting facility.
1 Configure the Hypervisor Whether you use a private or hosted server, first create a
virtual environment to build out a cloud. Then install Citrix’s XenServ-er hypervisor. The following are key features of XenServer’s virtualiza-tion:
n High availability. With server pooling, workloads are kept in a redundant state. If a failure occurs, virtual machines (VMs) are migrated automatically between hosts.
n Storage support. XenServer sup-
ports several storage devices and can manage the devices directly at the graphical user interface and command-line level.
n VM provisioning. Administrators can quickly deploy new VMs when peak usage requires it. They can also tie in a provisioning server to manage VM images.
Depending on the deployment, the hypervisor has several other features. When the hypervisor is operational, you’ll need to attach storage for newly created images.
2 Authenticate Appliances Offered as a virtual or physi-cal server, the Citrix NetScaler
appliance is used for load balanc-ing, as an application firewall or for entry-point security. The choice between a physical or virtual device will depend on your traffic through-put requirements or need for a
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1 SIX STEPS TO BUILDING A CITRIX PRIVATE CLOUD
SIX STEPS TO BUILDING A CITRIX PRIVATE CLOUDCitrix offers all the tools you’ll need to build a private cloud. These six steps will help you create a full-service cloud, with desktop delivery, identity federation and plenty of other user-friendly features. BY BILL KLEYMAN
hardware component.Because access to a cloud envi-
ronment must be secure, you’ll also need a solid gateway. NetScaler’s appliance allows you to create load-balancing servers that can handle user connectivity.
Cloud environments also require high availability among sites, which NetScaler’s Global Server Load Bal-ancing feature provides. The ability to link multiple sites creates a more robust and stable cloud infrastruc-ture.
3 Deliver Applications to the Cloud Now you need an engine to
house and deliver applications to the cloud. Citrix XenApp 6.5 deliv-ers applications to end users. You can install XenApp on a physical or virtual Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit instance for quick delivery. Then install applications, isolate them, manage user access through Active Directory (AD) and allow users to work seamlessly through the cloud.
User access is managed through XenApp’s Web interface. Authen-tication can occur on an instance of the Web interface installed on NetScaler or directly on the XenApp box. When logging into the cloud-facing portal, users enter their own AD credentials. Based on their secu-rity group, users will be given access to a specific subset of applications.
This portal can be accessed from any device at any location, as long as the user has an Internet connec-tion.
4 Enable Desktop Delivery For users, one of the biggest benefits of cloud computing is
that they can launch their own cor-porate desktops from anywhere on virtually any device. For example, a user can launch a Windows 7 corporate desktop from an iPad device in any location. If you cen-trally house all master images and give users access through the cloud, they can access corporate images via personal devices.
With technologies such as Citrix’s HDX, you can boost the speed and quality of Flash movies and pages in hosted desktops, making a seamless end-user experience. XenDesktop delivers desktops as a pooled or dedicated environment in which users receive the first available desktop or a persistent one, respec-tively.
When users launch their desk-tops from the cloud, they can also access personal applications that are housed on the XenApp server, to which the user connects when he or she signs into a desktop instance. To the user, it all looks seamless, as though the application is always available to the desktop. In reality, the process is separate and man-aged in the data center.
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5 Use Open Cloud Access for Identity Federation Many organizations now run
Software as a Service (SaaS) appli-cations in conjunction with a Citrix cloud environment. But when users need to remember to enter multiple credentials to access different SaaS applications, problems can arise.
Citrix’s Open Cloud Access brings identity federation to the cloud and allows you to place SaaS icons, such as Salesforce or GoToMeeting, directly into a user’s portal. Then, with an existing set of AD creden-tials, users can log into any SaaS application without having to re-enter a username and password.
6 Put the Finishing Touches on Your Cloud Citrix’s recent acquisition
of CloudStack takes cloud deliv-ery to the next level. CloudStack is an open source cloud OS that’s similar to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, except CloudStack delivers public clouds with your hardware. CloudStack orchestrates virtualized resources into a homogeneous envi-ronment where you can delegate the creation of various VMs through a self-service CloudStack portal.
CloudStack enables a secure, multi-tenant cloud computing environment; with one click, you
can deploy virtual servers from a predefined template. Virtualized instances can be turned off, paused and restarted via the Web interface, the command line or the extensive CloudStack application program-ming interface.
The product integrates with Xen-Server, allowing for greater manage-ability of a Citrix cloud environment. The console offers a view of the aggregate storage, IP pools, CPU, memory and other resources. Addi-tionally, it lists events that occur in the cloud in chronological order, making it easy to track them.
With the addition of CloudStack, you can make better decisions on how to deliver an enterprise-level cloud. Cloud architects can dedi-cate an entire VLAN to a specific account for MPLS support between network nodes. Enterprises can also create a multirole support environment that gives administra-tors access to only those tools they need.
As cloud computing evolves, so will its product base. Vendors will continue to develop powerful new tools that allow for a more seamless cloud delivery strategy and, most important, a more robust and posi-tive end-user experience. n
Bill Kleyman, MBA, MISM, is a virtualization solutions architect at MTM Technologies, a national IT consulting firm.
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Take the “business first” approach
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THE INCREASING ADOPTION of public cloud services and agile program-ming methodologies has made it clear that cooperation between software developers and IT opera-tives is critical.
These two groups have radically divergent worldviews: Develop-ers want immediate access to new computing and storage resources, along with accommodation of fre-quent minor application updates. IT operations groups want stabil-ity and reliability; they worship the status quo of the data center’s net-worked resources and software.
DevOps is a nascent IT discipline that aims to bring order to this chaotic world of application/ser-vice development, testing, deploy-ment, scaling and monitoring and to ensure software quality, security, availability, reliability and perfor-mance.
THE BUREAUCRACY OF ITCommissioning new server instanc-
es—even virtual ones—can require an act of Congress. Systems admin-istrators and quality assurance teams treat new apps and updates like they carry the bubonic plague, erecting complicated change-man-agement systems to protect what
they believe is a brittle infrastruc-ture. Such a mind-set mismatch can create conflicts and reduce operational efficiency. This is where DevOps comes in.
James Urquhart of Cisco Systems is an early DevOps evangelist who
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DevOps: BRINGING ORDER TO THE CHAOTIC CLOUD The emerging IT discipline known as DevOps just might break down some silos and get IT professionals to work collaboratively. BY ROGER JENNINGS
FOR COMPANIES THAT WANT LOWER-COST AND MORE FLEX-IBLE AND ELASTIC ON-DEMAND IT INFRA-STRUCTURE, OPEN SOURCE CLOUD COMPUTING CAN MAKE SENSE.
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noted that “up until now, IT has worked from a server-centric opera-tions model; cloud is an application-centric operations model.” Accord-ing to a blog post by John Allspaw, vice president of technical opera-tions at Etsy, “DevOps is what some people are calling the renewed cross-interest in development and operations collaboration.”
A blog post on the DevOps dis-connect quotes Andrew Shafer, an engineering lead at Cloudscaling: “DevOps isn’t so much about devel-opers helping operations; it’s about operational concerns becoming
more and more programmable and operators becoming more and more comfortable and capable with that.”
According to cloud blogger Chris Hoff, Allspaw considers DevOps to “really be about tools + culture + communication.” The term DevOps didn’t appear in Google Trends until late 2010, but DevOps practitioners already have plenty of monitoring and management tools to choose from for public and private Infra-structure as a Service and Platform as a Service clouds.
Migrating computing resources from a traditional on-premises data
DevOps: CREATING COOPERATIVE TEAMSA Venn diagram illustrates the intersection of development,
technology operations and quality assurance.
DevOps
Technology Operations
Development(Software
Engineering)
Quality Assurance
(QA)
center to a public cloud—and the attendant budgetary transfers—is likely to have a traumatic effect on an organization’s operations and QA teams. Unchecked, these prob-lems will probably lead to a more defensive posture and a toxic rela-
tionship with development groups.As James Turnbull, director of
operations at Puppet Labs, asserts in a blog post on DevOps, “DevOps is about people and nature of the environment you want to work in. The best thing about the movement for me is that it is trying to foster behaviors and environments where people work together towards joint goals, rather than at cross-purposes or at odds. That’s a world I’d much rather use my skills in.” n
Roger Jennings is a data-oriented .NET devel-oper and writer, a Windows Azure MVP, the principal consultant of OakLeaf Systems and curator of the OakLeaf Systems blog. He’s also the author of 30-plus books on the Windows Azure Platform, Microsoft operating and other technologies.
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MIGRATING COMPUT-ING RESOURCES FROM A TRADITIONAL ON-PREMISES DATA CENTER TO A PUBLIC CLOUD IS LIKELY TO HAVE A TRAUMATIC EFFECT ON ... OPERA-TIONS AND QA TEAMS.
Strategies for Building a Private Cloud is a SearchCloudComputing.com
e-publication.
Margie Semilof Editorial Director
Lauren Horwitz Executive Editor
Michelle Boisvert, Christine Cignoli Senior Editors
Jeannette Beltran, Eugene Demaitre, Martha Moore
Associate Managing Editors
Linda Koury Director of Online Design
Marc Laplante Publisher
TechTarget 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466
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