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1
White Paper
Managing Public Cloud Computing
in the Enterprise
A Quick Start Guide
White Paper
Effectively Managing
Amazon Web Services in
Hybrid IT Environments
2
Table of Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... 3
Amazon in the Enterprise How is it Being Used? .................................................................. 4
Best Practices for Public Cloud Computing in the Enterprise................................................. 5
Cloud Automation Technologies ............................................................................................... 6
Hotlink Platform & Workload Transformation Technology ...................................................... 7
Hotlink + Cloud Automation........................................................................................................ 9
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 10
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Abstract
Public cloud computing, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the most prominent example,
creates an entirely new class of enterprise IT services with very low financial barriers to accessing
a broad menu of compute resources. As a result, many business units, development
organizations and other enterprise end users have independently embraced public cloud
services, generally at a lower budgetary cost, and in a much shorter timeframe than if the same
resources were procured from corporate IT.
The ease with which public cloud resources can be accessed has led to proliferation of loosely
managed or unmanaged AWS accounts in many enterprises. Non-IT professionals are often
creating and operating sizable computing environments that are outside of any consistent
management controls and are completely non-standard with respect to policies and
procedures that internal IT follows when creating and ensuring enterprise-compliant computing.
This activity usually flies under the radar until one of several things happen: (1) the aggregate
costs become large and finance starts asking questions, (2) the expense volatility sounds a
budget or accounting alarm, or (3) a security or compliance breach becomes visible at the
corporate level. At this point, public cloud computing usually becomes an enterprise priority.
What’s the right answer? Business units and developers need to be able to easily instantiate
cloud-based services, matching the quantity consumed to their budgets. But, those services
need to be provisioned and monitored according to reasonable standards, compliance
guidelines and management controls. And, the enterprise needs to be able to easily migrate
workloads back and forth between on-premise internal environments and public clouds, so
workloads are truly portable during their lifecycle. If these conditions are met, business units and
developers can continue to enjoy the productivity benefits of public cloud computing, but with
cloud-based resources being deployed in a structured, managed and compliant manner
consistent with enterprise requirements.
Moreover, if a proper management and operating model for public cloud services is well
integrated into the existing virtualization management environment, internal IT would be in a
position to improve its own operating leverage by selectively migrating other workloads to public
cloud-based services.
This white paper addresses how enterprises can simultaneously meet three goals: (1) allowing
business units and developers to maintain freedom and agility in the use of public cloud services,
(2) enabling enterprise-appropriate provisioning and operating standards for the workloads
deployed in public clouds, and (3) accomplishing the first two goals while continuing to improve
the operating agility and leverage of internal IT departments. We will explain how these three
seemingly conflicting objectives can be addressed easily with HotLink® Hybrid Express™ the
industry’s simplest solution for deploying, administering and managing hybrid IT environments in
the enterprise.
4
Amazon in the Enterprise How is it Being Used?
There is no denying the popularity and rapid growth of AWS and other public cloud services.
On-demand resources have become extremely popular with application developers, QA
professionals and business units across the enterprise for the following key reasons:
• Non-IT professionals can quickly and easily order and deploy relatively complete and
packaged servers with the required database, application and web server software.
• Instances can be purchased in a variety of sizes, with a range of committed resources.
• Server operations are completely outsourced to the public cloud provider and do not
require internal infrastructure.
• A range of price plans are available including spot pricing, consumption-based
resources and “always on” instances.
• If applications need to scale up or down, this is easily and automatically accomplished
without significant pre-planning.
• Users do not have to go through a protracted corporate procurement process as they
often do with internal IT services.
However, the tremendous popularly of AWS with non-IT professionals, combined with the low
barriers to procurement and deployment, are creating a range of problems in the enterprise:
• A significant divergence exists in the build and operating procedures of users who
independently establish public cloud accounts and those of corporate IT from how
accounts are established, who can access them, management of proprietary
information, decommissioning of resources, how costs are controlled, etc.
• Running workloads in a public cloud on a small scale or on transient basis is extremely
cost effective. In fact, application prototyping, development and testing have never
been more economical. Deploying applications at scale, 24x7, at a public cloud
provider is usually much more costly and variable month-to-month than anticipated.
• Due to cost, many adopt a “start public and end up private” model. Development and
testing are resourced at a public cloud vendor. Production releases are then deployed
in the corporate data center. But, the public cloud workloads are often not compliant
with IT standards, and migrating off these services can be a big problem.
The bottom line is this. Public cloud resources are a significant opportunity for enterprises to
deliver more innovation, in a shorter period of time and at a reduced total cost. Proactive steps
and leadership by corporate IT to provide best practices, a low-overhead management
approach for public cloud resources, and an efficient bridge between on- and off-premise IT
infrastructure will substantially increase corporate IT’s strategic value to the business.
5
Best Practices for Enterprise Public Cloud Computing
The most important point when considering best practices in enterprise public cloud computing
is the following. If people opt out, it will not work. Amazon Web Services caught on like wildfire
because end users were not getting the IT services needed, in a reasonable timeframe for an
acceptable cost. Erecting all the same barriers or dispensing heavy-handed best practices for
public cloud in the enterprise is exactly the wrong thing to do.
Best practices in enterprise public cloud usage must be lightweight and occur without
negatively impacting the productivity of developers, business units and other end users of public
cloud services. Critically important is that these constituents be able to use public cloud services
in the same flexible and productive manner as before, but now have access to new and useful
capabilities like a seamless workload on- and off-ramp for AWS workloads. For best practices
to be accepted, end users and their managers must derive actual benefit from the new
operating model, not just become victims of a new set of corporate restrictions.
With extensive infrastructure and operations experience in managing virtualized resources,
corporate IT can deliver tangible value to public cloud consumers in the enterprise by: (1)
helping new users quickly and effectively utilize AWS resources without training or knowledge
of the details of Amazon services, (2) arming managers with real-time tools to monitor AWS
workloads, usage and costs, (3) providing automated, painless capabilities for migrating
workloads to and from AWS, and (4) delivering guidance in the construction and configuration
of workloads that will transition in-house for production.
If corporate IT has standardized on VMware vCenter to deploy, administer and manage on-
premise virtual machines, this infrastructure can and should be leveraged for all public cloud
workloads. Ultimately, cloud-based services become part of a global IT resource pool. The
investments made for managing on-premise virtual resources need to be extended to include
off-premise resources so the enterprise can:
1. Utilize the existing on-premise management infrastructure and skills across AWS accounts
and instances
2. Manage all functions of on-premise virtual environments and off-premise resources within
this singular console
3. Enable end user managers to have trusted access roles for AWS resource visibility and
management
4. Standardize snapshots and templates for provisioning across internal data centers and
off-premise public clouds
5. Implement seamless two-way migration of all workloads (both Windows and Linux)
between on- and off-premise environments
6. Use consistent enterprise policies for role-based access and change management
across all on-premise virtual resources and off-premise public clouds
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Technology now exists that enables full platform interoperability and workload portability as a
seamless extension of existing VMware vCenter management environments. IT architects would
benefit from a robust understanding of this technology to design streamlined infrastructure for
hybrid management in the enterprise. More about this will be covered later in the paper.
If corporate IT takes a leadership role early in delivering useful tools and operating models for
enterprise end users of AWS resources, they can not only provide strategic value to the business
but also avoid having their own productivity derailed in the future by the use of fragmented,
overlapping and incompatible processes and toolsets that will inevitably proliferate among
developers, business units and other public cloud end users as operations grow.
Cloud Automation Technologies
Some vendors are promoting the notion that hybrid on- and off-premise management can be
solved through cloud automation. With this approach, a self-service portal, orchestration layer
and service catalogs are implemented on top of the public cloud resources and on-premise
private clouds, including all of their associated and disparate management consoles.
While layering a self-service provisioning portal on top of disparate on- and off-premise virtual
environments provides benefits for certain use cases, these capabilities alone do not address the
fundamental manageability requirements for public cloud computing in the enterprise, as
outlined in the earlier best practices section.
VM
VM
Self-Service Portal
VM
VM
VM
VM
Orchestration
Service Catalog
Hardware
On-Premise Off-Premise
Clo
ud
Aut
omat
ion
Virt
ual I
nfra
stru
ctur
e M
anag
emen
t
vSphere XenServer KVM
VM
VM
Hyper-V
VMwarevCenter
MicrosoftSCVMM
XenCenter
RHEV Manager
API API API API
Insta
nce
Insta
nce
Amazon
AmazonConsole
API
Hardware
Insta
nce
Insta
nce
Other
Other CloudConsole
API
Hardware
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First of all, each virtualized environment still requires its own management toolset for
deployment, administration and management. Enterprises often support multiple hypervisors on-
premise and a variety of public cloud platforms, so the complexity of operating all these
management consoles is considerable. Second, there is no mechanism for common templates
and snapshots that span the heterogeneous on- and off-premise environments to ensure public
cloud instances are both initially provisioned and remain consistent with IT standards and
compliance requirements. Third, no seamless or automated mechanism exists by which
workloads can migrate across all these environments.
The net result is that cloud automation solutions alone will not deliver a cohesively managed
solution for enterprise IT and the business unit and development teams currently utilizing public
cloud resources. Moreover, cloud automation is a complex and expensive endeavor, often
referenced as a “journey” because of the many products, management layers, databases,
custom scripts, service catalogs, self-service portal and professional services required to
implement. Enterprises should not confuse the requirement for seamless hybrid operational
management, spanning on- and off-premise resources, with a cloud automation “journey.”
HotLink Platform & Workload Transformation Technology
Most enterprise IT organizations have significant investments in VMware vSphere for on-premise
virtual infrastructure and have invested substantially in training administration staff and architects
on the VMware administration tools, particularly VMware vCenter. Additionally, 3rd party tools,
custom scripts and workflows have been built and deployed around the on-premise virtual
management infrastructure.
Effective hybrid management of on- and off-premise resources mandates interoperability with
existing infrastructure and operations. Any hybrid management “solution” that that does not
enable the VMware management infrastructure to readily extend to public cloud resources will
be complex to integrate into current operations, challenging to scale and expand, and difficult
to administer and manage. That’s why HotLink assumes hybrid management in the enterprise
must utilize VMware vCenter as the single point of administration, management and integration
across hybrid on- and off-premise virtualized resources.
HotLink invested extensively in the patented platform and workload transformation technologies
that enable the industry’s simplest solution for deploying, administering and managing hybrid on-
and off-premise compute environments HotLink Hybrid Express. The HotLink software natively
extends the existing VMware vCenter management environment to Amazon EC2, with the full
management functionality of on-premise now extended to public cloud. There is no prerequisite
of any other management consoles, databases, connectors, new templates or professional
services. With HotLink technology, hybrid platforms, both on- and off-premise, can be
incorporated into the existing management infrastructure and operational model without
increasing management complexity or requiring professional services to implement. HotLink also
enables fully unified administration and management of multiple-hypervisors on-premise, as
shown below.
8
Hybrid IT Simplicity with HotLink
HotLink hybrid management does not just mean being able to accomplish tasks on each
platform in its native manner; it means being able to accomplish cross-platform on- and off-
premise tasks in a manner consistent with the standards and processes that have been well-
honed for the existing on-premise virtual data center and with a management console that is
intuitive, robust and already in use VMware vCenter.
Public cloud users and managers in business units and development teams can now be given
roles-based VMware vCenter access to enable easy management of their public cloud
resources including the ability to:
• Clone & migrate workloads to/from public cloud with simple point & click
• Create, use & manage hybrid snapshots
• Convert workloads bi-directionally
• Utilize existing on-premise templates in hybrid environments
• Monitor, track and manage team and individual usage
• Apply automation across hybrid resources
The Hotlink technology also allows unified templates for provisioning to/from public cloud
resources, consistent with internal standards. This provides significant productivity benefits by
eliminating the complexity and time involved in rebuilding workloads for hybrid environments.
VM
VM
Self-Service Portal
VM
VM
VM
VM
Orchestration
Hardware
On-Premise Off-Premise
Clo
ud
Aut
omat
ion
Virt
ual I
nfra
stru
ctur
e M
anag
emen
t
vSphere XenServer KVM
VM
VM
Hyper-V
Insta
nce
Insta
nce
Amazon
Hardware
Insta
nce
Insta
nce
Other
Hardware
Existing Mgmt Console (e.g. VMware vCenter)
HotLink Platform
API
Service Catalog
9
With the HotLink platform and workload transformation technology, enterprises can readily
extend existing consoles to public cloud resources so deployment, administration and
management of all on- and off-premise resources can be consolidated with a single pane of
glass and single point of integration VMware vCenter. Because other platforms are
managed natively, compatible orchestration tools, service catalogs and self-service portals work
out-of-the-box. Best of all, these hybrid capabilities can be added to the existing environment in
less than a half a day, with no special IT skills.
HotLink plus Cloud Automation
The Hotlink technology is complementary to self-service provisioning models and cloud
automation deployments. In fact, deploying HotLink substantially streamlines the
implementation and operation of cloud automation infrastructure by enabling VMware vCenter
to be the single point of administration, management and integration for all hybrid resources.
Native management toolsets for disparate virtual infrastructures can be eliminated since full
functionality is available through VMware vCenter.
HotLink
Transformation
Cloud
Automation
Example solutionsHotLink plus
VMware vCenter
vCloud Suite,
RightScale,
Eucalyptus
Single admin & mgt console for on & off-premise
hybrid platforms VMware vCenter
Eliminates multiple native consoles
Seamless cross-platform VM snapshots, cloning,
single template provisioning
Workload conversions & migration
Unified security, monitoring, performance reporting
Single point of integration VMware vCenter
Self-service portal
Workload orchestration
Service catalog
NOYES
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Conclusion
Best practices in enterprise public cloud computing need to provide value to all parties, whether
corporate IT, developers or business units otherwise, they will not be embraced and adopted.
In this paper, we have outlined straightforward and practical methods for IT to provide important
services to the public cloud users and managers inside the enterprise by leveraging existing IT
infrastructure, knowledge and best practices. When considering the best overarching
management strategy for hybrid on- and off-premise resources, the logical approach is to
extend a known management construct, selectively deploying high value capabilities to the
new users who need them.
At HotLink, our charter is to enable hybrid computing using the IT management infrastructure
already installed a simple idea with sizable impact for the enterprise. We believe this is the
most pragmatic way to enable compute resources, whether on- or off-premise, to pooled and
consumed on-demand while supporting responsible corporate governance and efficient
resource delivery. To that end, the HotLink patented platform and workload transformation
technology addresses hybrid platform complexities at a fundamental computer science level,
so enterprises can easily and cost-effectively provide public cloud based services in a managed
model. The best news is that with HotLink, hybrid capabilities can be added to the existing
environment in less than half a day.
Many vendors will financially benefit from a more radical reengineering of the environment over
an extended period of time and characterize it as a “journey.” History strongly suggests that
leveraging existing investments and building new enterprise capabilities on a solid foundation is
more highly correlated with future success than a taking a journey.
If your organization is facing any of the challenges or opportunities presented in this paper,
please contact us to learn more about HotLink Hybrid Express the industry’s simplest solution
for deploying, administering and managing hybrid IT environments in the enterprise.
Contact Us
HotLink Corporation
3130 De La Cruz, Suite 211
Santa Clara, CA 95054
(408)463-6130
www.hotlink.com
© 2017 HotLink Corporation. All rights reserved. HotLink and HotLink Hybrid Express are trademarks or registered trademarks of HotLink Corporation. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.