Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures: 9 Circles of Hell to Avoid Xangati Blog Atchison Frazer Vice President, Marketing
June 17, 2015
Xangati Blog The Gartner IT Operations Strategy & Solutions Summit wrapped up here in Orlando today, and having attended this event many times in the past, it was striking that the title changed to include “strategy” and that the majority of survey responding attendees cited strategy as a key motivator for attending. One of the strategy sessions that I attended was, “Why Private Clouds Keep Failing,” presented by Gartner research director Mark Lockwood, who previously was with Eli Lilly and Company, where he served as virtualization architect and end-user computing architect. Mark described the top challenges enterprise end-user organizations face when building private clouds and the common pitfalls of attempting a private cloud project. He analyzed the shortcomings of common cloud management market offerings and offered recommended steps to mitigate those challenges. He used a bull’s-eye graphic playing off Dante’s nine circles of hell/fail), and it seemed to me, especially given Mark’s background, that there is a strategic role for infrastructure performance management tools to play to “beta-test” private/hybrid cloud environments. So, with apologies to Mark (and Dante), here are my nine circles of hell to AVOID a failed private cloud implementation.
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Policies Team/Structure: Replatforming legacy infrastructures to a private cloud architecture naturally threatens to break down traditional silos in terms of roles and responsibilities, as well as traditional infrastructure topologies. Virtualization infrastructure admins are most likely the closest profile within IT to matriculate to private cloud design (humbly stated by a longtime networking guy). What better way to coalesce the disparate IT functions that a private cloud architecture overlays than to standardize on a global view of all key performance data and efficiency metrics that can help evaluate a business case for the project? That is especially true if it’s a top-down decision with procurement dollars already allocated.
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Process/Governance: There are a lot of pilots in the cockpit of private cloud deployments. With shadow or shallow IT activities rampant, how do you determine if a new functional component is out of process or threatens to break the private cloud architecture? Having an extensible performance monitoring platform, with a shared risk/reward view of all existing and net-new components that are dropped inline, is a valuable service to ensure proper governance and to ensure that SLAs are not violated. Additionally, SaaS apps and BYOD entities that threaten overall process control can be tracked and reported at a highly granular level to determine of any one of the virtual service consumption metrics is out of policy.
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Automation Complexity: Self-service, rapid provisioning and dynamic workload scheduling are all desirable elements of a private cloud. But if performance should break down for whatever reason, shouldn’t that be automated too? And I don’t mean filling out a service ticket form; nobody wants to have to do that. How about visual trouble tickets that paint a picture of performance degradation at the exact moment it’s happening with historical trend analysis of all conventional silo interactions?
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Third-party Integration: Third party solutions, such as cloud management platforms, will be required to plug in to your private cloud, and not uncommonly, more than one due to the complexity of implementation, integration, customization and maintenance. Performance management can help reduce the complexity of how you gain insights into systems management, virtualization platforms and cloud management; a 360-degree holistic view platform, that can take API calls from other management tools, is key to streamlining third party integration.
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Long-term Commitment: While demanding long-term SLA commitments, it’s important to work with vendors who can also align with your enterprise business objectives. Often it takes months and sometimes years to fully realize the ROI benefits of a private cloud implementation, and there’s no one turnkey solution. However, for the short term, it’s important to adopt a performance management solution that offers immediate time-tovalue, that gets smarter the more it learns from the environment, and that can dynamically flex to the elastic promise of cloud service provisioning.
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Public Cloud Compatibility: Agility is certainly a goal of private cloud adoption, particularly with demand for faster stand up of new workloads or services delivered via the cloud. However, as capacity demand or new market opportunities dictate, some of those workloads or services might make better sense to run in a public cloud, where cost is perhaps lower and more easily tracked for chargebacks or show backs. However, private/public cloud services can often result in “cloud sprawl” if not properly managed in terms of performance enhancements and overall operational efficiency of on-premise private cloud infrastructures.
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Team Skills: The one IT professional profile that you can demand top dollar for today is “data scientist.� One reason is that with the explosion of big data and things that ping other things over the Internet, a scientific approach to data is certainly required. However, how about traditional IT personnel who want to expand their competencies into the data realm without securing a PhD? Performance management tools make that possible by automating the way data are curated and correlated, with dynamic triggers for storm contention severity and prescriptive actions for more intelligent operations and right size capacity planning.
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Infrastructure (Hypervisors, Servers, Storage and Networking): One area to avoid in terms of Day 2 operation of the private cloud, is to have to log into several different management and performance consoles for each of the conventional infrastructure silos that underpin private clouds. If you have a performance management platform that captures highly granular data not only from the functional components of the infrastructure, but that also provides a real-time predictive analysis capability across all of the silos, then your time and productivity investments are better protected.
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Service Assurance: Service assurance, guaranteeing end-user quality of experience of private cloud services including application response metrics, is the ultimate responsibility for the IT department and a major resource consumption concern of business stakeholders – ensuring that all applications are healthy, workloads are balanced to achieve peak efficiency in the use of the IT infrastructure, and that service-level targets are consistently met while end users enjoy a superior workspace experience from any client or mobile device anywhere in the world.
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