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Whether public or private, a cloud is indispensable for everyone!

In 2014, we are finally in the year of the cloud. Promise! As in 2012 and 2013, it will make the breakthrough this year. Promise! It is written everywhere. If we take the sarcasm a little bit aside and face the reality, the truth does not look so bleak. It just depends on the shape of the cloud. IDC and Gartner are talking about billions of dollars to be invested in the global public IaaS market in the coming years. Crisp Research has looked at the German IaaS market in 2013 and came to completely opposite numbers. In public IaaS about 210 million euros were invested, while private cloud infrastructures reached investments of several billion euros. The contrast between two markets can’t hardly be different. But that’s ok. This our German mindset. Careful. Slowly. Successful. However, one thing companies should write on their agenda for 2014 and the years ahead. Whether talking about a public or private cloud. One thing is certain. No company can do without a cloud anymore! Guaranteed! Why? Read on.

The deployment model of IT has changed

Basically, in a cloud it is about how IT resources are provided. This is done on-demand via a self-service and using a billing model that determined costs according to actual consumption.

The above mentioned IT resources, in the form of applications (SaaS), platforms (development environments; PaaS) and infrastructures (virtual servers, storage; IaaS) are provided as services that a user can order. This means in reverse, that you may not stop at an ordinary virtualization. Virtualization is just a means to an end. Finally, the user must somehow get to the resources. Pick up the phone, call the IT department and wait is not a sign that a cloud infrastructure is available. Quite the contrary.

Based on what kind of cloud the resources are provided depends on the use case. There is no “Uber Cloud” that solves all the problems at once. For a public cloud exist sufficient use cases. Even for topics or industries that seem far away at first. Bottom line, in many cases it is a question of data. And exactly these needs to precisely be classified. Then it can come to the decision that only a private cloud comes into question. In this case, a company will become its own cloud provider (with all the highs and lows a public cloud provider has to deal with), develops its own cloud infrastructure and supplies its internal customers directly. Or one can go to one of the managed cloud providers, that exclusively operate a private cloud within a dedicated environment, only for one customer and also have professional services in their portfolio, that public cloud providers typically offer only via a network of partners.

It is solely crucial that companies turn to a cloud model, because…

Employees ask for services on demand

Employees want services and they want them now and not in two weeks or three months. And if they do not get what they need, then they find a way to get it. Honestly! There are many attractive alternatives on the IT market for quite some time, which are just a few clicks and a credit card number away to satisfy the needs. That especially in the IaaS area still waits a lot of work, with this case most non IT people are unaware. But they obviously got what they needed and if it was just the desire for attention. The cloud provider has finally responded immediately. The miracle of self-service!

IT-as-a-Service is not just a buzz word. It is the reality. IT departments are under pressure to work as a separate business unit and even develop products and services for their company or to provide them at least according to the needs. Therefore, they must respond proactively. And here not to apply cuffs is meant, by closing the firewall ports. No, here it is about to question themself.

That this works, the Deutsche Bahn subsidiary DB Systel impressively demonstrated by reducing the deployment process from 5 days to 5 minutes(!) per virtual server with its own private cloud.

Keep hybrid cloud in mind

While the constant discussions, whether a public or private cloud comes into question, one should always keep the option of a hybrid cloud in mind.

A hybrid cloud allows a unique use case for the use of a public cloud. Here, certain areas of the IT infrastructure (computing power and storage) are translocated in a public cloud environment. The rest and mission-critical areas remain within the self-managed on-premise IT infrastructure or private cloud.

In addition, the hybrid cloud model provides a valuable approach for the architecture design by sections of the local infrastructure, which cause high costs, but equally are difficult to scale, are combined with infrastructure that can be provisioned massively scalable and when required. The applications and data to be rolled out on the best platform for the individual case and the processing between the two is integrated.

The use of hybrid scenarios confirms the fact that not all IT resources should be translocated in public cloud environments and for some it’s never even come into question. Are overall issues such as compliance, speed requirements and security restrictions considered, a local infrastructure is still necessary. However, the experiences gained from the hybrid model help to understand what data should be kept locally and which can be processed within a public cloud environment.

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Business in the Internet of Everything, Hybrid Cloud, A travelling suitcase #tsy13

During the breakout sessions at the T-Systems Symposium I visited three topics. One cloud, mobile and collaboration respectively The Internet of Things each. In the next days I’m going to write a comment or detailed analysis on each of these topics. However, I already would give a sneak preview, since these are really interesting use cases.

Business Transformation in the age of collaboration and The Internet of Things

Cisco sees its future as an enabler for the Internet of Everything (IoE). The difference to the today frequenty discussed Internet of Things (IoT) is in the amount of connected objects. Where IoT is connecting people with machines and machines with machines, IoE is on people, processes, data and things. This means there is a need for more connectivity. For this purpose, Cisco sees about 50 billionen smart objects in 2020 worldwide which are connected with each other. Here fog computing should help in the future what I’ve already introduced and analyzed.

Ready for Hybrid Cloud with T-Systems DSI vCloud = VMware vCloud Datacenter Services

A VMware study shows that 37 percent of leading european IT decision makers suppose not captured costs for used cloud services within their enterprise. In addition, 58 percent of european knowledge workers would use not approved cloud services. VMware sees a solution in IT-as-a-Service. Here IT departments position themselves as a competitor to external service provider. VMware also notes that historically arised IT silos like storage, network, server, Windows, Unix and Linux are the biggest challenges for IT-as-a-Service. Here the software-defined datacenter which is based on the components virtual server, software-defined network and software-defined storage should help. All together, this builds the foundation to migrate workloads on demand to a certified vCloud datacenter via a hybrid cloud.

Bag2Go: The modern suitcase on a lonely travel

With its Bag2Go, an intelligent bag, Airbus will separate people from their luggage. This means that a bag can have another route to the destination as the traveller itself. Therefore the bag offers various characterstics: self-weighing, self-labeling, self-travelling. Even the permanent tracking of the bag and its status is possible. Airbus promises that no changes are need to be made to the existing infrastructure of an airport. Airbus future goal is to establish fully interlinked transport capsules as a standard. An Internet of Things use case. Bag2Go uses the infrastructure of the T-Systems business cloud.

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AWS OpsWorks + VPC: AWS accelerates the pace in the hybrid cloud

After the Amazon Web Services (AWS) have acquired the German company Peritor and its solution Scalarium last year and renamed it to AWS OpsWorks, the further integration into the AWS cloud infrastructure follows. The next step is the integration with the Virtual Private Cloud which is, given the current market development, a further punch in the direction of the pursuer.

AWS OpsWorks + AWS Virtual Private Cloud

AWS OpsWorks is a DevOps solution with which applications can be deployed, customized and managed. In short, it ensures the entire application lifecycle. This includes features such as a user-based SSH management, CloudWatch metrics for the current load and the memory consumption, automatic RAID volume configurations and other options for application deployment. In addition, OpsWorks can be expanded with Chef by using individual Chef recipes.

The new Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) support now enables these OpsWorks functions within an isolated private network. For example applications can be transfered from an own IT infrastructure into a VPC in the Amazon Cloud by a secure connection between the own datacenter and the Amazon cloud is established. Thus, Amazon EC2 instances within a VPC behave as if it would be running in the existing corporate network.

OpsWorks and VPC are just the beginning

Believing in the results of the Rackspace 2013 Hybrid Cloud survey, 60 percent of IT decision-makers have the hybrid cloud as the main goal in mind. Here 60 percent will or have withdrawn their applications and workloads in the public cloud. 41 percent left the public cloud partially. 19 percent want to leave the public cloud even completely. The reasons for the use of a hybrid cloud rather than a public cloud are higher security (52 percent), more control (42 percent) and better performance and higher reliability (37 percent). The top benefits, which hybrid cloud users report, including more control (59 percent), a higher security (54 percent), a higher reliability (48 percent), cost savings (46 percent) and better performance (44 percent).

AWS has recognized this trend early in March 2012, and started the first strategic steps. The integration of OpsWorks with VPC is basically just a sideshow. The real trump card holds AWS with the cooperation of Eucalyptus, which was signed last year. The aim is to improve the compatibility with the AWS APIs by AWS supplies Eucalyptus with further information. Furthermore, developers from both companies focus on creating solutions that enterprise customers to help migrate existing data between data centers and the AWS cloud. The customer will also get the opportunity to use the same management tools and their knowledge of both platforms. With version 3.3 Eucalyptus already could present first results of this cooperation.

It will be exciting how the future of Eucalyptus looks. Eventually, the open source company is bought or sold. The question is who makes the first move. My advice is still that AWS must seek an acquisition of Eucalyptus. From a strategic and technological point of view there is actually no way around it.

Given this fact Rackspace and all the other who jumped on the hybrid cloud bandwagon may not have high hopes. Amazon put things on the right track and is also prepared for this scenario.

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openQRM 5.1 is available: OpenStack and Eucalyptus have a serious competitor

openQRM project manager Matt Rechenburg already told me some of the new features of openQRM 5.1 at the end of July. Now the final release has been released with additional functions. The overall picture looks really promising. Although the heading at first can suspect that openQRM is something completely new, which is trying to outstrip OpenStack or Eucalyptus. But this is not by a long shot. openQRM already exists since 2004 and has built up a wide range of functions over the years. The open source project from Cologne, Germany unfortunately lost a little in the crowd, because the marketing machines behind OpenStack and Eucalypts run at full speed and the loudspeakers are many times over. Certainly, openQRM must not hide from them. On the contrary, with version 5.1, Rechenburg’s team again has vigorously gain functions and particular enhances the user experience.

The new features in openQRM 5.1

openQRM-Enterprise sees in the hybrid cloud an important significance for the future of cloud as well. For this reason, openQRM 5.1 was extended with a plugin to span a hybrid cloud with the cloud infrastructures of the Amazon Web Services (AWS), Eucalyptus Cloud and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC). Thus, openQRM is using AWS as well as Eucalyptus and UEC as a resource provider for more computing power and memory and is able to manage public cloud infrastructures as well as local virtual machines. This allows administrators, based on openQRM, to transparently provide their end-users Amazon AMIs via a cloud portal and to monitor the state of the virtual machines via Nagios.

Another new feature is the tight integration of Puppet. With that end-users can order virtual machines as well as public cloud infrastructures with personalized, managed software stacks. The best technical renovation is the consideration of the Amazon Web Services high-availability concept. Does an Amazon EC2 instance fail, automatically a new one starts. openQRM 5.1 is even able to offset the outage of an entire Amazon Availability Zone (AZ). Is an AZ not available anymore the correlate EC instance will be started in another Availability Zone of the same region.

According to CEO Matt Rechenburg, openQRM-Enterprise expands the open source solution openQRM consistently with cloud spanning management solutions in order to empower its customers to flexibility grow beyond the borders of their own IT capabilities.

In addition to technical enhancements much emphasis was placed on ease of use as well. In openQRM 5.1 the user interface for the administrator was completely revised. This ensures a better overview and user guide. Even the dashboard, as a central point has benefited greatly, by all of the information such as the status of the data center, are displayed at a glance.

New features have been introduced for the openQRM-Enterprise Edition, too. This includes a new plugin for role-based access rights management, which allows fine-grained setting permissions for administrators within the entire openQRM system. With that complete enterprise topologies can be mapped to openQRM roles in order to restrict administrators who are responsible only for virtualization in the enterprise to the management and provisioning of virtual machines.

Further renovations in openQRM 5.1 include an improved support for virtualization technology KVM, by now using it for KVM GlusterFS volumes as well. In addition, VMware technologies are better supported. This means that now even existing VMware ESX systems can be managed as well as local or over the network bootable VMware ESX machines and can be install and managed.

openQRM takes a big step forward

Although openQRM significantly longer exists on the market as OpenStack or Eucalyptus. Nevertheless, the level of awareness of both projects is larger. This is mainly due to the substantial marketing efforts of both the OpenStack community and of Eucalyptus. But technological and functional openQRM must not hide. On the contrary, openQRMs functions is many times more powerful than that of OpenStack or Eucalyptus. Where the two focus exclusively on the topic of cloud, openQRM also has a complete data center management solution included.

Due to the long history openQRM has received many new and important features in recent years. However, as a result it also lose track of what the solution is able to afford. But who has understood, that openQRM is composed of integrated building blocks such as “Data Center Management”, “Cloud Backend” and “Cloud Portal”, will recognize that the open source solution, especially in the construction of private clouds, provides an advantage over OpenStack and Eucalyptus. Especially the area of ​​data center management must not be neglected for building a cloud to keep track and control of its infrastructure.

With version 5.0, the structures already begun to sharpen and to summarize the individual functions into workflows. This was worked out by the 5.1 release once again. The new look and layout of the openQRM backend has been completely overhauled. It looks tidier and easier to use and will positive surprise all customers.

The extension with the hybrid cloud functionality is an important step for the future of openQRM. The result of the Rackspace 2013 Hybrid Cloud survey showed that 60 percent of IT decision-makers have the hybrid cloud as the main goal in mind. Here 60 percent will or have withdrawn their applications and workloads in the public cloud. 41 percent left the public cloud partially. 19 percent want to leave the public cloud even completely. The reasons for the use of a hybrid cloud rather than a public cloud are higher security (52 percent), more control (42 percent) and better performance and higher reliability (37 percent). The top benefits, which hybrid cloud users report, including more control (59 percent), a higher security (54 percent), a higher reliability (48 percent), cost savings (46 percent) and better performance (44 percent).

openQRM not surprisingly orientates at the current public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. Thus, in combination with Eucalyptus or other Amazon compatible cloud infrastructures, openQRM can also be used to build massively scalable hybrid cloud infrastructures. For this purpose openQRM focuses on its proven plugin-concept and integrates Amazon EC2, S3 and Eucalyptus exactly this way. Besides its own resources from a private openQRM Cloud, Amazon and Eucalyptus are used as further resource providers to get more computing power quickly and easily.

The absolute killer features include the automatic applications deployment using Puppet, with which the end-user to conveniently and automatically can provide EC2 instances with a complete software stack itself, as well as the consideration of the Amazon Availability Zone-wide high-availability functionality, which is neglected by many cloud users again and again due to ignorance. But even the improved integration of technologies such as VMware ESX systems should not be ignored. Finally, VMware is still the leading virtualization technology on the market. Thus openQRM also increases its attractiveness to be used as an open source solution for the management and control of VMware environments.

Technological and functional openQRM is on a very good path into the future. However, bigger investments in public relations and marketing are imperative.

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Exclusive: openQRM 5.1 to be extended with hybrid cloud functionality and integrates Amazon AWS and Eucalyptus as a plugin

It’s happening soon. This summer openQRM 5.1 will be released. Project manager and openQRM-Enterprise CEO Matt Rechenburg already has told me some very interesting new features. In addition to a completely redesigned backend design the open source cloud infrastructure software from Cologne, Germany will be expanded with hybrid cloud functionality by integrating Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and their clone Eucalyptus as a plugin.

New hybrid cloud features in openQRM 5.1

A short overview of the new hybrid cloud features in the next version of openQRM 5.1:

  • openQRM Cloud works transparently with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus.
  • Via a self-service end-user within a private openQRM Cloud can order by an administrator selected instance types or AMI’s which are then used by openQRM Cloud to automatically provision to Amazon EC2 (or Amazon compatible clouds).
  • User-friendly password login for the end-user of the cloud via WebSSHTerm directly in the openQRM Cloud portal.
  • Automatic applications deployment using Puppet.
  • Automatic cost accounting via the openQRM cloud billing system.
  • Automatic service monitoring via Nagios for Amazon EC2 instances.
  • openQRM high-availability at infrastructure-level for Amazon EC2 (or compatible private clouds). This means: If an EC2 instance fails or an error occurs in an Amazon Availability Zone (AZ) an exact copy of this instance is restarted. In case of a failure of an entire AZ, the instance starts up again in another AZ of the same Amazon region.
  • Integration of Amazon S3. Data can be stored directly on Amazon S3 via openQRM. When creating an EC2 instance a script that is stored on S3 can be specified, for example, that executes other commands during the start of the instance.

Comment: openQRM recognizes the trend at the right time

With its extension also openQRM-Enterprise shows that the hybrid cloud is becoming a serious factor in the development of cloud infrastructures and comes with the new features just at the right time. The Cologne based company are not surprisingly orientate at the current public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. Thus, in combination with Eucalyptus or other Amazon compatible cloud infrastructures, openQRM can also be used to build massively scalable hybrid cloud infrastructures. For this purpose openQRM focuses on its proven plugin-concept and integrates Amazon EC2, S3 and Eucalyptus exactly this way. Besides its own resources from a private openQRM Cloud, Amazon and Eucalyptus are used as further resource providers to get more computing power quickly and easily.

In my opinion, the absolute killer features include the automatic applications deployment using Puppet, with which the end-user to conveniently and automatically can provide EC2 instances with a complete software stack itself, as well as the consideration of the Amazon AZ-wide high-availability functionality, which is neglected by many cloud users again and again due to ignorance.

Much attention the team has also given the optics and the interface of the openQRM backend. The completely redesigned user interface looks tidier and easier in the handling and will positively surprise the existing customers.