Cloud Vanguard

Cloud Management is Cost Mitigation

In an analogy I attribute to Michael Crandell; Instances are like raw diamonds.  It’s great to have quality base materials, but the real value shines when you cut and polish them.

The investment in the server resources is important, but that’s the easy part.  It’s what you do with them that is going to be the most critical part of any application of infrastructure (yes, that’s a pun).  Cloud Management Platform vendors are aware that we’re on our way to a multi-cloud world.  Every major player has jumped into the game with some type of platform or infrastructure offering–I’m assuming my audience at this point won’t require me to list them all.  The point is, it should matter to companies interested in deploying their applications or services on the cloud that the vendor they select is pushing hard for support of multiple infrastructure providers and creators.  Tools for cloud management will be the biggest contested space in the race for cloud supremacy.

It’s obvious really, why would anyone think that the War for the Clouds would take place on the ground?

Cloud management software should be a big decision in the strategy and investment of any organization moving their infrastructure into the cloud.   Don’t just stare at numbers on a spreadsheet and compare the cost of the cheap commodity hardware purchased and racked at deep volume discounts with state of the art server management technology.  There are many sunk costs associated with developing without a multi-cloud management platform.  Consider these, all of which could be classified as $$ per hour per cloud:

Learning Curve(s)
Commensurate costs should be estimated inclusive of RnD costs, trial and error, and scattered nature of educational resources, documentation and support resources for DIY integrations.  They should also account for ongoing education around new cloud infrastructure developments.  Just trying to keep up with the firehose of information about cloud computing is a full time job in and of itself (although most of the work is sifting through the hype).

Integration Development/Training
Engineering cycles will be spent integrating an application or service into the cloud regardless of which way it’s approached.  Cloud computing is not plug and play, so you should take care to work with a company that is working fervently on creating switchboards where it can be.  Isn’t that what you wanted in the first place?   Then there is a matter on training staff on operating procedures around development, testing, deployment and administration.  How many times can you afford to do that?  Invest those cycles into something with longevity in interoperability.  A cloud agnostic API is also a big plus.  Eventual standardization of an API would be great and many vendors will likely adopt components of it; but ultimately an API that you pay for should provide much more then the basics.

Revisioning and Lifecycle Management
Internal engineering resources would be required to revision and support all cloud server components. In addition to your own applications.  Cloud management tools should focus on more then just launching servers.  They should focus on making it easier to maintain a variety of useful components and utilities and should address the fact that there is both power and confusion in numbers.  Disposable servers mean lots to keep track of over a long period of time.  Software should track these resources beyond their instantiation at a given moment.  This is about business continuity after all.

Ongoing Cloud Development/Maintenance/Support
Resources would be needed to evaluate, develop, test, QA, and implement, new features as they are released to the public from various infrastructure providers.  Do you have time to keep track of that all?  Your revenue is directly generated by your application or service; not by spending time on more RnD in a space that’s rapidly changing the IT landscape by the day.  Cloud platforms are competing for your dollars in this place.  So you can bet that they are paying close attention to what’s going on so you don’t have to.  This is the cloud mentality; companies should start acclimating.

Monitoring, Emergency Support
Commensurate costs would include development/integration of cloud monitoring systems, on-call engineering resources and incident response time.  These costs would be multiplied by the number of servers you’re running.  Some infrastructure providers do offer these services as an additional cost, so you’re going to pay for it either way.  This is an obvious and critical component of a cloud management platform and there should be both I and AI based resources available to leverage in the case of an issue.

Remediation
Warn and Automate! Not all problems would need to be addressed manually with an engineering resource; and problems are not 9 to 5 employees.  Constant systems administration is required for any infrastructure, yet much of it can and should be automated, especially in the cloud.  Incidents that require manual intervention could potentially lead to additional overtime costs at less-then-social hours.  Using cloud management software to set up automated remediation decreases the likelihood of a critical escalation.

Partner Technology
The cloud is the ultimate technology deliver platform for ISVs as well.  Independent Software Vendors should also be leveraging a cloud platform when considering their deployment strategy.  How will you deliver your technology to multiple infrastructures and reach the largest number of users with the least amount of effort?  End users should also welcome the emergence of cloud appliance federation tools.   Cloud platform vendors again will be competing for a piece of the cloud app-store.  Apple and Facebook’s model examples will be followed.

The bottom line is that investment in cloud management software will mitigate many of these costs in the long term through software innovation.  We’re still at the tip of the iceberg.  Make sure you’re comitting your valuable engineering and dollar resources to something that will ultimately provide you with better agility in the clouds–especially when it comes to base infrastructure providers.  When you first heard buzz about hosting your servers in the cloud you probably envisioned cloud management software…

Invest in your instinct.

April 28, 2009 Posted by cloudvanguard | Cloudnomics | cloud management, Cloudnomics, paas | 2 Comments