Amazon Aims for Enterprises - Poo Poos Internal Clouds

Amazon's announcement yesterday regarding an enterprise feature for linking existing datacenter operations to Amazon's AWS via a Virtual Private Network feature did not surprise me. It is an obvious extension of their value proposition, and folks had already been accomplishing a similar capability with work-arounds that were simply a bit more cumbersome than Amazon's integrated approach. The more surprising piece of news, in my opinion, is the subtle racheting up of the rhetoric by Amazon regarding their disdain for the notion of “internal” cloud. Werner Vogels blog post explaining the rational for the new VPN features is a case in point. Here are a few tasty excerpts:

Private Cloud is not the Cloud

These CIOs know that what is sometimes dubbed "private [internal] cloud" does not meet their goal as it does not give them the benefits of the cloud: true elasticity and capex elimination. Virtualization and increased automation may give them some improvements in utilization, but they would still be holding the capital, and the operational cost would still be significantly higher. . . .

What are called private [internal] clouds have little of these benefits and as such, I don't think of them as true clouds. . .

[Cloud benefits are]

* Eliminates Cost. The cloud changes capital expense to variable expense and lowers operating costs. The utility-based pricing model of the cloud combined with its on-demand access to resources eliminates the needs for capital investments in IT Infrastructure. And because resources can be released when no longer needed, effective utilization rises dramatically and our customers see a significant reduction in operational costs.

* Is Elastic. The ready access to vast cloud resources eliminates the need for complex procurement cycles, improving the time-to-market for its users. Many organizations have deployment cycles that are counted in weeks or months, while cloud resources such as Amazon EC2 only take minutes to deploy. The scalability of the cloud no longer forces designers and architects to think in resource-constrained ways and they can now pursue opportunities without having to worry how to grow their infrastructure if their product becomes successful.

* Removes Undifferentiated "Heavy Lifting."The cloud let its users focus on delivering differentiating business value instead of wasting valuable resources on the undifferentiated heavy lifting that makes up most of IT infrastructure. Over time Amazon has invested over $2B in developing technologies that could deliver security, reliability and performance at tremendous scale and at low cost. Our teams have created a culture of operational excellence that power some of the world's largest distributed systems. All of this expertise is instantly available to customers through the AWS services.

Elasticity is one of the fundamental properties of the cloud that drives many of its benefits. While virtualization has tremendous benefits to the enterprise, certainly as an important tool in server consolidation, it by itself is not sufficient to give the benefits of the cloud. To achieve true cloud-like elasticity in a private cloud, such that you can rapidly scale up and down in your own datacenter, will require you to allocate significant hardware capacity. While to your internal customers it may appear that they have increased efficiency, at the company level you still own all the capital expense of the IT infrastructure. Without the diversity and heterogeneity of the large number of AWS cloud customers to drive a high utilization level, it can never be a cost-effective solution.

OK. Let's examine Werner's sales proposition without the pressure to sell anything (as I am not currently trying to sell anyone anything). Clearly, Amazon is now attacking the vendors such as VMware that seem intent on attacking them by proclaiming that Amazon cannot give you enterprise features. Not only is Amazon delivering features targeted at the enterprise, but they are also scaling up the war of words by poo pooing the value proposition of these classic vendors – namely the notion of an internal cloud. Werner makes two assertions in dissing internal clouds:

First, he asserts that an internal cloud is not elastic. Well, why not? Just because your IT department has historically been labeled the NO department doesn't mean that it always must be that way. Indeed, the very pressure of Amazon providing the terrific services they provide without the mind-numbing procurement and deployment friction of your IT department is going to lead to massive changes on the part of IT. They are going to virtualize, provide self provisioning tools, and more closely align business application chargebacks to actual application usage. If the application owners are thoughtful about their architecture, they will be able to scale up and scale back based upon the realities of demand, and their IT transfer costs will reflect their thoughtfulness. Other business units will benefit from the release of resources, and server hoarding will be a thing of the past. All this is not to say that an IT department should “own” every bit of compute capacity they use. They don't. They won't. And there will probably be an increasing shift toward owning less.

But Werner claims that ownership is generally a bad thing in his second assertion that capex is bad and opex is good. Werner writes that cloud eliminates costs by eliminating capital spending. Well, it might - depending on the scenario. But his insinuation that capex is bad and opex is good is silliness. They are simply different, and the measurement that any enterprise must take is one relating to risk of demand and cost of capital. For a capital constrained startup with high risk associated with application demand, laying out precious capital for a high demand scenario in the face of potential demand failure makes no sense at all. However, for a cash rich bank with years of operating history relative to the transaction processing needs associated with servicing customer accounts, transferring this burden from capital expense to operating expense is equally senseless. Paying a premium for Amazon's gross profit margin when demand is fairly deterministic and your cost of capital is low is certainly a losing proposition.

The challenge and the opportunity of cloud for any enterprise is moving applications to an architecture that can exercise the cloud option for managing demand risk while simultaneously striking the right balance between capex and opex relative to the cost of capital. I find it funny that Amazon's new VPN feature is designed to make this opportunity a reality, while the blog post of their CTO announcing the feature proclaims that internal operations are too costly. Maybe they are viewing the VPN as a temporary bridge that will be burned when capex to opex nirvana is attained. Personally, I see it as the first of many permanent linkages that will be built to exercise the cloud option for managing demand risk. Lower costs associated with a proper portfolio balance of capex and opex is just icing on the cake.

VMware Springs Big for SpringSource

In a blog post back in May, I described why I believed a SpringSource and Hyperic combination was a good thing. In the new world of virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing, the application delivery and management approach is going to be lightweight and lean. At the time, however, I never imagined lightweight and lean would be worth $420M to VMware. While I have no doubt that a lightweight and agile approach to application delivery and management is going to replace the outdated heavy approach of J2EE and EJB, I am not quite convinced that VMware is getting in this deal what they want us to believe they are getting – general purpose operating system irrelevance.

VMware has done an incredible job abstracting the hardware away from the general purpose operating system. Now they have moved to the other end of the stack in an attempt to abstract the application away from the operating system. If the operating system is not responsible for hardware support and it is likewise not responsible for application support, then it is irrelevant, right? It is a good theory, but it is not quite true.

While the majority of application code will certainly be written in languages that can be supported by SpringSource (java, grails), there will remain lots and lots of application utilities and services that are provided by various programs that are not, and will never be, written in Java or the related languages supported by SpringSource. All of these various programs will still need to be assembled into the system images that represent a working application. And while I absolutely believe the general purpose operating system should die an ugly death in the face of virtualized infrastructure and cloud computing, I do not believe that operating systems can be rendered irrelevant to the application. I simply believe they become lighter and more application specific. I also believe that we are going to see a proliferation of application language approaches, not a consolidation to Java alone.

Acquiring SpringSource puts VMware on the path to providing not only Infrastructure as a Service technology, but also Platform as a Service technology. From what I have seen to date in the market, PaaS lags far, far behind IaaS in acceptance and growth. I have written multiple posts praising the Amazon approach and decrying the Google and Salesforce approach for cloud because the latter requires developers to conform to the preferences of the platform provider while the former allows developers to exercise creativity in the choice of languages, libraries, data structures, etc. That's not to say that PaaS cannot be a valuable part of the application developer toolkit. It's just that the market will be much more limited in size due to the limitations in the degrees of freedom that can be exercised. And if developers love one thing more than anything else, it is freedom.

VMware's acquisition of SpringSource moves them into the very unfamiliar territory of developer tools and runtimes. It is a different sale to a different audience. Developers are notoriously fickle, and it will be interesting to see how a famously insular company like VMware manages to maintain the developer momentum built by the SpringSource team.

Microsoft Embraces Linux Virtual Appliances

In a very savvy move aimed at gaining competitive advantage in the cloud computing space, Microsoft yesterday announced that they were contributing source code to the Linux kernel in order to optimize the performance and management of virtual appliances on Microsoft's hypervisor, Hyper-V. One of the goals of cloud computing is elasticity – applications scale up and down based upon the hour by hour demand for the application. Well, you cannot have hour by hour elasticity for an application when it takes days/weeks/months to install, provision, and instrument the application onto the infrastructure. Virtual appliances eliminate this challenge by allowing the application owner to pre-configure the application as a set of virtual machines that are ready to respond to demand. The “set-up” is done “off-line.” Microsoft, realizing that Linux is the de facto underpinning for virtual appliances that run on Amazon's EC2, is now contributing code to Linux that will optimize the performance and management characteristics of Linux-based virtual appliances on Hyper-V – the virtualization technology that underpins Microsoft's Azure cloud.

Microsoft's new status as a Linux kernel contributor sheds light on the amazing shift that is occurring in the battle-lines for IT infrastructure. The operating system is going to split, with one half becoming the control software for the hardware (the hypervisor) and the other becoming the control software for the application (virtual appliances). Given their huge advantage with developers based upon the installed base of applications that run on Microsoft-only application frameworks (.Net, etc.), Microsoft has determined that they need to pull out all of the stops in order to be certain they do not get ripped off the hardware in favor of VMware (the dominant hypervisor) or Xen (the hypervisor that supports Amazon's market leading cloud service). Linux is no longer the biggest threat to Microsoft in the datacenter when datacenters begin embracing a cloud architecture such as Amazon's in order to enable IT-as-a-Service.

If indeed this move enables higher elasticity and simpler management of Linux based virtual appliances that run atop Hyper-V, the competitive pressure might force VMware to follow suite and make their drivers and tools available as source code that is included in the Linux kernel. To be clear, Microsoft does not currently plan to support Linux virtual appliances on Azure, but that position may be shifting with changes of this type. With Amazon currently holding the dominant position in cloud and with VMware holding the dominant position in the datacenter for virtualization, Microsoft might have lots of crafty tricks up its sleeve to re-assert themselves in this new theater of datacenter war where hypervisors and virtual appliances rule the day.

IBM Cloud Fizzles

Based on my positive review below of IBM's CloudBurst technology for building internal clouds, I tuned into the IBM webinar for the external cloud companion product with high hopes. I was hoping to hear about a consistent architecture across the two products that would allow an enterprise to federate workloads seamlessly between the internal and external cloud. Boy, was I disappointed.

It seems the IBM external cloud is nothing more than an IBM hosted capability for running virtual appliances of IBM Rational Software products. Among my many disappointments:

- no ability to run virtual appliances defined by me. They don't even publish a specification.

- no federation between internal and external. They are not even the same architecture because one runs Xen and the other runs VMware, and they do not provide a conversion utility.

- private beta (alpha maybe?) for invited customers only. Why make an announcement?

- no timetable for general availability of a product. Why make an announcement?

This announcement was a terrible showing by IBM to say the least. It is obvious to me that the CloudBurst appliance folks (call them “left hand”) and the Smart Business cloud folks (call them “right hand”) were two totally different teams. And the left hand had no idea what the right hand was doing. But each was intent not to be outdone by the other in announcing “something” with cloud in the title. And they were told to “cooperate” by some well meaning marketing and PR person from corporate. And this mess of a situation is the outcome. Good grief!

Federation - The Enterprise Cloud Objective

I know the title to this blog post sounds a bit like a Star Trek episode, but I believe I have an useful point to make with the term federation - even at the risk of sounding a bit corny. I have been watching with interest the lexicon of terms that are emerging to describe the architecture and value of cloud computing. VMware uses the terms Internal/External/Private to describe the distribution of application workloads across multiple networks in a coordinated fashion. Sun uses the terms Private/Public/Hybrid, respectively, to describe the same architecture (although they would argue for Sun branded components in lieu of Vmware/EMC branded components). I think both of these term sets as descriptors for a cloud architecture that distributes workloads across multiple networks are flawed and confusing. Rather than simply complaining, however, I am willing to offer a solution.

The term Federation describes the end state of an effective cloud architecture perfectly, and I think we should all begin using it when we attempt to sell our respective goods and services to enable the enterprise cloud. Whether part of a Internal/External/Federation combination or a Private/Public/Federation combination or Network1/Network2/Networkn/Federation, the common term accurately describes the end objective of cloud computing.

First, some attribution. This term was presented to me as a descriptor for cloud value during my work with the cloud infrastructure group at EMC (the folks that own the Atmos product line) over a year ago. It is now my turn to put some greater structure on this enviable original thought that belongs to EMC.

A good general definition for Federation (independent of an IT context) is a union of member entities that preserves the integrity of the policies of the individual members. Members get the benefits of the union while retaining control over their internal affairs.

In the case of a technology infrastructure federation (aka a cloud architecture), the primary benefit of the union is the lower cost and risk associated with a pool of technology assets which are available across a diversified set of independent networks. In other words, application workloads should be distributed to the network with the lowest risk adjusted cost of execution – i.e. based upon the risk policies of the enterprise. If the risk of running a mission critical, enterprise workload on Amazon's AWS network is deemed high (for whatever reason, real or perceived), that workload might stay on a proprietary network owned by the enterprise. Likewise, a low risk workload that is constantly being deferred due to capacity or complexity constraints on the enterprise network might in fact be run for the lowest cost at Amazon or a comparable provider. For a startup, the risk of depleting capital to purchase equipment may dictate that all workloads run on a third party network that offers a variable cost model for infrastructure (Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS).

Independent of the proprietary calculus for risk that must be undertaken by every enterprise relative to their unique situation, it should become clear to all that the distribution of application workloads across multiple networks based upon the cost/capability metrics of those networks will lower the risk adjusted cost of enterprise computing. The same diversification theories that apply to managing financial portfolio risk also apply to managing the distributed execution of application workloads. The historical challenge to this notion of application workload federation is the lack of an efficient market – the transaction cost associated with obtaining capacity for any given application on any given network were too high due to complexity and lack of standards for application packaging (de facto or otherwise). Now, with virtualization as the underpinning of the network market, virtual appliances as the packaging for workloads, high bandwidth network transit and webscale APIs for data placement/access, the time is coming for an efficient market where infrastructure capacity is available to applications across multiple networks. And Federation is the perfect word to describe a cloud architecture that lowers the risk adjusted cost of computing to the enterprise. Enterprise. Federation. Clouds. Star Trek.

Cloud Application Management - Agile, Lean, Lightweight

The acquisition of Hyperic by SpringSource got me thinking about the next generation of application delivery and management for cloud applications. At first, I was cynical about this combination – two small companies with common investors combining resources to soldier on in a tough capital environment. While this cynical thinking probably has a kernel of truth to it, the more I thought about the combination the more I thought that it makes sense beyond the balance sheet implications. Indeed, I believe the future of application delivery and management will combine agile development with lean resource allocation and lightweight management. This new approach to application delivery and management is one that complements the emerging cloud architecture for infrastructure.

Agile development, with its focus on rapid releases of new application functionality, requires a programming approach that is not overly burdened with the structure of J2EE and EJB. Spring, Rails, Grails, Groovy, Python all represent the new approach – placing a premium on quick delivery of new application functionality. Application functionality takes center stage, displacing the IT infrastructure dominance of the legacy application server oriented approach. Developers will use what works to deliver the application functionality instead of using what works for the IT organization's management framework. The new approach does have implications for scalability, but we will get to that issue in a moment.

Lean is one of the newer terms emerging to describe the future of application delivery. I first referenced lean as an IT concept by relating it to the lean approach for manufacturing operations in a blog post about a year ago. With lean application delivery, applications scale horizontally to consume the infrastructure resources that they require based upon the actual demand that they are experiencing. The corollary is that they also contract to release resources to other applications as demand subsides. This “lean” approach to resource allocation with dynamic scaling and de-scaling is what a cloud architecture is all about – elasticity. Rather than optimizing the code to “scale up” on an ever bigger host, the code remains un-optimized but simple – scaling out with cheap, variable cost compute cycles when the peaks in demand require more capacity. Giving back the capacity when the peaks subside.

With the lean approach for resource allocation, a lightweight management approach that measures only a few things replaces the old frameworks that attempt to measure and optimize every layer in an ever more complex infrastructure stack. If the service is under stress due to demand, add more instances until the stress level subsides. If the service is under extremely light load, eliminate resources until a more economical balance is struck between supply and demand. If an instance of a service disappears, start a new one. In most cases, you don't even bother figuring out what went wrong. It costs too much to know everything. This lightweight approach for management makes sense when you have architected your applications and data to be loosely coupled to the physical infrastructure. Managing application availability is dramatically simplified. Managing the physical hosts becomes a separate matter, unrelated to the applications, and is handled by the emerging datacenter OS as described by VMware or the cloud provider in the case of services like those provided by Amazon AWS.

Take a look at the rPath video on this topic. I think it reinforces the logic behind the SpringSource and Hyperic combination. It rings true regarding the new approach that will be taken for rapid application delivery and management in a cloud infrastructure environment. Applications and data will be loosely coupled to the underlying infrastructure, and agile development, lean resource allocation, and lightweight management will emerge as the preferred approach for application delivery and management.

McKinsey Recommends Virtualization as first step to Cloud

In a study released last week, the storied consulting company, McKinsey & Company, suggested that moving datacenter applications wholesale to the cloud probably doesn't make sense – it's too expensive to re-configure and the cloud is no bargain if simply substituted for equipment procurement and maintenance costs. I think this conclusion is obvious. They go on to suggest that companies adopt virtualization technology in order to improve the utilization of datacenter servers from the current miserable average of ten percent (10%). I think this is obvious too. The leap that they hesitated to make explicitly, but which was called out tacitly in the slides, was that perhaps virtualization offers the first step to cloud computing, and a blend of internal plus external resources probably offers the best value to the enterprise. In other words cloud should not be viewed as an IT alternative, but instead it should be considered as an emerging IT architecture.

With virtualization as an underpinning, not only do enterprises get the benefit of increased asset utilization on their captive equipment, they also take the first step toward cloud by defining their applications independent from their physical infrastructure (virtual appliances for lack of a better term). The applications are then portable to cloud offerings such as Amazon's EC2, which is based on virtual infrastructure (the Xen hypervisor). In this scenario, cloud is not an alternative to IT. Instead, cloud is an architecture that should be embraced by IT to maximize financial and functional capability while simultaneously preserving corporate policies for managing information technology risk.

Virtualization as a step to cloud computing should also be viewed in the context of data, not simply application and server host resources. Not only do applications need compute capacity, they also need access to the data that defines the relationship of the application to the user. In addition to technology such as VMware and Citrix's Xen technology, enterprises also need to consider how they are going to abstract their data from the native protocols of their preferred storage and networking equipment.

For static data, I think this abstraction will take the form of storage and related services with RESTful interfaces that enable web-scale availability to the data objects instead of local network availability associated with file system interfaces like NFS. With RESTful interfaces, objects become abstracted from any particular network resource, making them available to the network where they are needed. Structured data (frequently updated information typically managed by a database server technology) is a bit trickier, and I believe solving the problem of web-scale availability of structured data will represent the “last mile” of cloud evolution. It will often be the case that the requirement for structured data sharing among applications will be the ultimate arbiter of whether an application moves to the cloud or remains on an internal network.

The company that I founded, rPath, has been talking about the virtualization path to cloud computing for the past three years. Cloud is an architecture for more flexible consumption of computing resources – independent of whether they are captive equipment or offered by a service provider for a variable consumption charge. About nine months ago, rPath published the Cloud Computing Adoption Model that defined this approach in detail with a corresponding webinar to offer color commentary. In the late fall of last year, rPath published a humorous video cartoon that likewise offered some color on this approach to cloud computing. With McKinsey chiming in with a similar message, albeit incomplete, I am hopeful that the market is maturing to the point where cloud becomes more than a controversial sound-byte for replacing the IT function and instead evolves into an architecture that provides everyone more value from IT.

Killing the OS Octopus

The inspiration for this blog post title comes from a Paul Maritz (CEO of VMware) quote, during his presentation to financial analysts last week. Paul used the phrase "severing the tentacles of complexity" multiple times when referring to the new level of business flexibility that is possible when applications are liberated from their physical host by encapsulating them inside of a virtual machine with “just enough operating system (or JeOS).” They can be provisioned much more quickly because there is no need to provision physical assets. They can be moved from datacenter to datacenter more quickly because there is no onerous installation and validation process required. Indeed, virtualization enables cloud computing because the applications are no longer defined by the physical computers upon which they run. But, until VMware truly embraces a JeOS approach with their operating system support matrix, they are simply recommending “isolating” the tentacles of complexity. And the result will be a perilous and expensive condition often referred to as VM sprawl.

So what is the difference between “isolating” the tentacles of complexity and “severing” them? Isolating the tentacles means shoving the previous definition of your application running on a physical server into a virtual machine box. When you put a virtual machine box around the octopus, it can no longer create mischief with other application octopi running on the same physical host. Its tentacles are “isolated,” and utilization on the physical host can be much higher. This approach is valuable, and it has catapulted VMware into the spotlight as one of the hottest technology companies on the planet.

However, the octopus is still alive and well inside the box, and system administrators must continue to feed that hungry animal in exactly the same way they did when it was living on a physical server host. The level of maintenance has not been reduced. The level of security vulnerability has not been reduced. Although isolated, it is still a resource hog because those crazy tentacles demand CPU, and memory, and disk to flail and flap as they do. This condition of ever expanding system administration grief associated with the frictionless deployment of virtualized applications whose tentacles of complexity have simply been isolated and not severed is known as VM sprawl. And it will be a nightmare of system administration expense for those that embrace it.

In order to avoid the nightmare of VM sprawl, the tentacles of the complexity octopus must actually be severed, not simply isolated. Application developers and system administrators alike must re-think the category of the operating system in the context of a virtualized datacenter. Since the operating system is no longer the conduit for managing the hardware, it should become a simple shared library for system services required by the application. Two great example of this approach are rPath and BEA's (now Oracle) liquid VM technology. With both of these platforms, the operating system is specified in a manner that explicitly supports the needs of the application – without any extra bloat associated with the typical general purpose OS approach. As a result, the OS in both of these cases is 10X or more smaller than the smallest installation option offered by a general purpose OS. In theory, this should lead to a 10X reduction in the scope and scale of administration activities. Severing the tentacles of complexity by re-thinking the OS eliminates the perils of VM sprawl.

But VMware does not currently support this approach. They only support the legacy vendors of general purpose OS technology. Sure, these new approaches have terrific performance and value, and VMware is happy to have them contribute to the value of their virtual appliance market, but their support statement pretty clearly favors “isolation” of complexity over true elimination of complexity. But the winds of change are steadily and surely blowing in favor of this new approach in the market. Red Hat, for example, just announced that they are going to market with a bare metal hypervisor that is directly competitive with the VMware approach in lieu of their historical product architecture - where virtualization was simply a feature of the general purpose operating system. And Paul Maritz was pretty clear in his presentation that “severing the tentacles of complexity” and a “just enough operating system” approach are important to VMware. Perhaps we are drifting toward the precipice of an all out war for the definition of the future datacenter operating system. I said it back in 2006, and I'll say it again today -- let's fry up that OS octopus polvo frito and serve it with some spicy mango chutney and cold beer.

Red Hat Goes Streaking - Dumps Xen

Yesterday Red Hat announced their revised virtualization strategy. Most interesting to me was Red Hat's declaration that the hypervisor should indeed lie "naked" on the metal. Red Hat also announced end-of-life for Xen support and some stuff regarding desktop virtualization and protocols that I don't pretend to understand. While it was expected that Red Hat would end-of-life support for Xen after their acquisition of the KVM technology from Qumranet, the fact that Red Hat went streaking into the market with a bare metal approach to the hypervisor was a pretty significant strategy reversal.

Until yesterday, Red Hat had always adopted the Microsoft line on the hypervisor - it is simply a feature of a general purpose operating system. Red Hat historically claimed that the hypervisor should not lie naked on the bare metal, but instead it should be wrapped up inside the general purpose OS - a little extra bloating that never hurt anybody. It looks like some combination of market forces - likely VMware financial success and Amazon's adoption of Xen for their Elastic Compute Cloud - have forced Red Hat to consider a new approach. Now Microsoft stands alone in their contention that a hypervisor is just a new general purpose OS feature, and the rest of the market can move on to the market share land grab for the large-scale Linux datacenters. It should be an interesting race, because all three players - Xen (Citrix), KVM (Red Hat), and VI (VMware) are all coming from different positions of strength - and weakness.

In almost every case I have observed, Xen is the incumbent virtualization technology among the Linux datacenter consumers that have virtualized any production workloads. However, not many have actually virtualized because the historical compelling case for virtualization - server consolidation - falls on deaf ears among the Linux crowd. With Linux, as opposed to Windows, it is possible to run multiple application workloads on a single server without significant instability. Server utilization can be quite high without virtualization - hence no requirement for Linux server consolidation. But, the new benefits of virtualization - flexibility, security, and elasticity - apply equally, if not especially, well to the Linux workloads. If application workloads are separated into unique, small footprint, virtual machines (virtual appliances, if you like) that run atop a bare naked hypervisor, then:

- flexibility is better because one application can be managed/administered without interfering with another workload running on the same host

- security is better because vulnerable services like DNS are isolated and easier to maintain/secure due to a smaller footprint

- elasticity is better because application workloads can be scaled quickly when demand increases and also retired quickly when demand recedes (cloud, anyone?)

Because of these new business benefits, Xen is beginning to take hold in the Linux datacenters. Citrix, however, has not historically been a strong brand among the Linux savvy crowd, so it is unclear if they have the stomach for pursuing a new market segment. VMware is the 800 pound gorilla in hypervisors generally, but they too have shown very little Linux savvy (their management console only runs on Windows) - probably because 90% of their revenues come from virtualizing Windows workloads. Then there is Red Hat, the 800 pound Linux gorilla who has been in denial about the importance of a bare metal approach for the hypervisor - until now.

Based on this set of circumstances, I would say that the virtualization opportunity for the Linux datacenter market is a wide open race. Now that Red Hat has decided to run the race naked, it should be more fun to watch.

Can You See the Clouds from Windows?

During the course of our webinar entitled "The Pragmatist's Guide to Cloud Computing: 5 Steps to Real ROI," several of the attendees submitted questions regarding the status of Windows as an environment for cloud applications. In a partial answer to the question, Jeff Barr, a speaker during the webinar and a member of the Amazon Web Services team, responded that a beta implementation of Windows for EC2 was now available. The problem with the notion of “Windows for EC2” is that it perpetuates the broken, legacy model of tying your application to the infrastructure upon which it runs.

In the legacy model, applications became artificially tied to the physical server upon which they ran, and server utilization was low because it is very difficult to run multiple applications on a single instance of a general purpose operating system. The reason it is difficult to run multiple applications on a single instance of a general purpose operating system is because each application has unique needs which conflict or compete with the unique needs of other applications. Virtualization technology, such as that provided by VMware or Citrix with XenServer, breaks the bond of the application to a physical server by placing a layer of software, called a hypervisor, on the physical hardware beneath the operating system instances that support each application. The applications are “isolated” from one another inside virtual machines, and this isolation eliminates the conflicts.

Amazon embraces this virtualization model by using Xen to enable their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. So what's the problem? If the OS instances are not tied to the physical servers any longer (indeed you do not even know which physical system is running your application on EC2, nor do you need to know), why am I raising a hullabaloo over a “broken model?” The reason this new model of Windows for EC2 is broken is because your application is now artificially coupled to EC2. When you begin with a Windows Amazon Machine Image (AMI), install your application on top, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test to get it right, and then save the tested configuration as a new AMI, the only place you can run this tested configuration of your application is on Amazon's EC2. If you want to run the application on another virtualized cloud, say maybe one provided by RackSpace, or Terremark, or GoGrid, or even your own internal virtualized cloud of systems, you have to install the application yet again, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test, configure-test to get it right again, and then save the tested configuration on the other cloud service. Why don't we just stop the madness and admit that binding the OS to the physical infrastructure upon which it runs is a flawed approach when applications run as virtual machine images (or virtual appliances) atop a hypervisor or virtualized cloud of systems like EC2?

The reason that we are continuing the madness is because madness is all we have ever known. Everyone knows that you bind an operating system to a physical host. Operating systems are useless unless they bind to something, and until the emergence of the hypervisor as the layer that binds to the physical host, the only sensible approach for operating system distribution was to bind it to the physical host. When you buy hardware, you make it useful by installing an operating system as step one. But if the operating system that you install as step one in the new virtualized world is a hypervisor in lieu of a general purpose operating system, how do we get applications to be supported on this new type of host? Here's your answer -- what we previously knew as the general purpose operating system now needs to be transformed to just enough operating system (JeOS or “juice”) to support the application, and it should bind to the application NOT THE INFRASTRUCTURE.

Virtualization enables the separation of the application from the infrastructure upon which it runs – making possible a level of business agility and dynamicism previously unthinkable. Imagine being able to run your applications on-demand in any data-center around the world that exposes the hypervisor (any hypervisor) as the runtime environment. Privacy laws prevent an application supporting medical records in Switzerland from running in an Amazon datacenter in Belgium? No problem, run the application in Switzerland. Need to run the same application in Belgium in support of a new service being offered there next month? No problem, run it on Amazon's infrastructure in Belgium. The application has to support the covert operations associated with homeland security and it cannot be accessed via any Internet connection? No problem, provide it as a virtual appliance for the NSA to run on their private network. Just signed a strategic deal with RackSpace that provides an extraordinary level of service that Amazon is not willing to embrace at this time? No problem, shut down the instances running on EC2 and spin them up at RackSpace. All of this dynamic capability is possible without the tedious cycle of configure-test -- if we will simply bind the operating system to the application in order to free it from the infrastructure and let it fly into the clouds.

So why doesn't Microsoft simply allow Windows to become an application support infrastructure, aka JeOS, instead of a general purpose operating system that is bound to the infrastructure? Because JeOS disrupts their licensing and distribution model. Turning a ship as big as the Microsoft Windows licensing vessel might require a figurative body of water bigger than the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans combined. But if they don't find a way to turn the ship, they may find that their intransigence becomes the catalyst for ever increasing deployments of Linux and related open source technology that is unfettered by the momentum of a mighty business model. Folks with valuable .Net application assets might begin to consider technology such as Novell's mono project as a bridge to span their applications into the clouds via Linux.

I can tell you that there are lots of folks asking lots of questions about how to enable Windows applications in the “cloud.” I do not believe the answer is “Windows for EC2” plus “Windows for GoGrid” plus “Windows for RackSpace” plus “Windows for [insert your data-center cloud name here].” If Microsoft does not find a way to turn the licensing ship and embrace JeOS, the market will eventually embrace alternatives that provide the business agility that virtualization and cloud computing promises.

VMware Strikes Back

The tech industry has been all abuzz lately about the competitive hullabaloo surrounding the new hypervisor technologies that are emerging to take on VMware's dominant hypervisor product. Microsoft launched Hyper-V with a party last week to upstage VMware's VMworld event this week. Red Hat purchased Qumranet to solidify its control of the KVM hypervisor technology. Now, VMware is striking back at the legacy OS vendors by labeling their new product category the Virtual Datacenter Operating System – a direct attack on the entrenched category of the general purpose operating system. The cold war of spies and covert operations to grab mindshare while outwardly promoting a message of peaceful co-existence has officially escalated to a hot war for the future architecture of the datacenter.

I, for one, am happy to see this rise in hostilities because I believe it will carry the industry to a much better place – and customers will be the primary beneficiary of the new approach. In the legacy datacenter, a general purpose operating system attempts to serve both the hardware infrastructure with device drivers while also serving the applications with system services. This approach has the disadvantage of artificially coupling applications to physical servers. Any attempt to move the application to another physical server typically requires that the configuration and validation process begin anew because it is extremely unlikely that the new server is absolutely identical to the previous one. This lack of flexibility leads to extreme overspending on capital equipment because an application with a period of low demand cannot relinquish its hardware resources to an application experiencing high demand. The hardware resources become application specific, and each application owner must size hardware capacity to meet peak demand. Server utilization in the datacenter averages 15 – 20%, and the general purpose OS is the culprit.

VMware has now declared that they offer an alternative approach to the general purpose operating system. The technology is not new, but marketing it under the category of an operating system is a very different tactic in this war for the datacenter. The conflict is now overt instead of covert, and this change was inevitable as VMware attempts to expand its footprint beyond its bread and butter business of Windows server consolidation and test lab operations. The new objective is the elastic datacenter and ultimately cloud computing.

The datacenter becomes elastic when applications are released by developers as coordinated sets of virtual machines (or virtual appliances in the case of a vendor release), each with Just Enough Operating System (JeOS or “juice”) attached to provide the system services required by the application. These applications can expand or contract on-demand because there is no onerous configuration process to ready the general purpose OS for a specific application. Instead, the hypervisor accepts the virtual machine and allocates it resources as specified by the OVF meta-data that is included with the image. Applications are up and running in a matter of seconds, and the process is totally repeatable to assure stability, security, and compliance as workloads scale, de-scale, and re-scale to meet the ever changing demand profiles of the enterprise application portfolio. Infrastructure can become a variable cost via this architecture because the scaling cycle can include hardware resources provided by third parties via a hypervisor layer – aka cloud computing as popularized by Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) via the Xen hypervisor.

The reason I label this new competitive tact by VMware as “warfare” is because the concept of a hypervisor as the infrastructure management layer with JeOS as the system services layer for the applications delivered as virtual machines destroys the value of the general purpose OS. If a hypervisor provides access to the infrastructure via device drivers, and applications receive system services from JeOS, and the flexibility of the datacenter improves, and the management of applications is simplified, and I can embrace cloud computing for variable cost infrastructure, why would I ever again buy a general purpose operating system? I won't. And customers won't either.

Unleash the dogs of war. Let's get to it so that we can all live happily ever after on the other side of history.

Red Hat oVirt(ly) targets VMware and Citrix

Red Hat announced last week that they are developing technology that will one day become a product to challenge the offerings from VMware and Citrix. The technology is showcased at a website sponsored and maintained by Red Hat as part of an “emerging technology” initiative. Aside from the fact that Red Hat is announcing technology projects and not products, the most noteworthy detail of this approach is the emergence of KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) as the hypervisor approach that Red Hat intends to back. Taking a page from the Microsoft HyperV playbook, Red Hat is claiming virtualization as a “feature” of the OS they already control in order to maintain their investment in the server distribution channel they have established with OEMs such as Dell, HP, IBM, Fujitsu, and others. Bare metal hypervisors and their associated infrastructure management frameworks are threatening the entrenched status quo of the operating system vendors, and Red Hat does not intend to “go gentle into that good night.”

Historically, a general purpose operating system performed two key functions: 1) provide drivers so that applications can access the hardware, and 2) provide system services (file system, libraries, etc.) to the applications. The trouble with this approach is that applications become artificially coupled to the hardware. Have you ever experienced pain upgrading hardware when the application that ran just fine on the old hardware no longer runs on the new hardware because of changes in the operating system? Do you find that you are continuously porting and testing applications just to upgrade hardware? Why? Because a one-size-fits-all general purpose operating system (OSFAGPOS) couples hardware support with application support due to the architecture of the product. Aside from the application portability issues, the OSFAGPOS approach also leads to the enormous management cost associated with bloating. Most applications run atop an operating system in the datacenter that is 10X the size actually required by the application, which leads to a patching nightmare.

To be fair to Red Hat, KVM could certainly be implemented and maintained by them as a skinny bare-metal hypervisor that only concerns itself with managing the hardware infrastructure. The Linux kernel is a fine provider of hardware support, and Red Hat has more Linux kernel expertise than any other vendor in the world. Their technical credibility in this space is terrific. The trick will be the marketing challenge of offering a product that has a very different value proposition than the OSFAGPOS. The goal of a bare-metal hypervisor is to support as many application OS variants as possible in order to enable application providers to choose the system software that works best for their application. This flexibility for the application flies in the face of the OSFAGPOS argument to “standardize” the OS to gain economies of scale in management and support. With OSFAGPOS, at least you know what systems need to be patched – all of them . . . all the time. Embracing a bare-metal product approach would mean that Red Hat also needs to face up to OSFAGPOS management challenges and embrace virtual appliance value for applications that run with Just enough OS (JeOS or "juice") optimized for their workload.

I believe that the separation of the duties of the historic OSFAGPOS architecture into two separate product domains - hypervisors for drivers and JeOS for application support - is inevitable. Separating hardware support from application support simply provides too many benefits. The popularity of both VMware and Amazon's emerging EC2 service are great examples. Watching both Red Hat and Microsoft navigate this change will be interesting. The marketing gurus at both companies will be strained to the breaking point as they “rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

EMC means Even More Clouds

Last week, Doug Merritt, an executive vice president at SAP, informed Information Week that EMC is planning to offer a computing utility service suitable for running enterprise applications. This “cloud” (a term popularized by Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud) would offer SAP an ability to deliver on-demand applications to enterprise customers without investing the significant fixed costs of large scale datacenters ala Salesforce.com. The cloud capability is likely to make heavy use of the VMware hypervisor technology owned by EMC (Amazon uses the competing technology called Xen) such that providers like SAP can define their applications as virtual appliances (or a set of virtual appliances, known as a virtual appliance network or VAN) and launch them on-demand into the cloud. ISVs such as KnowledgeTree are already doing this using virtual appliances and Amazon's cloud. Why not SAP with an EMC cloud? What is the likely scenario for enterprise adoption?

As enterprise customers increasingly virtualize their datacenter computing resources, it is going to become more and more common for them to rely on computing clouds outside of their datacenter for certain application workloads. Once you have virtualized the infrastructure and defined the applications you run as virtual appliances (i.e. they are defined independent of the computer that they run upon and are loaded on the virtualized infrastructure pre-configured with the OS), moving the application from datacenter to datacenter (or cloud to cloud) becomes much easier.

Rather than buying all the servers required to deliver the application at peak load, it makes more sense to launch new instances in the cloud during peak demand and pay a variable cost charge until the peak subsides. Similarly, batch oriented analysis that occurs once per day/week/month (perhaps closing the books and logging transactions at the end of a month) is an ideal application scenario for cloud computing with virtual appliances. Why own the servers when you only use them periodically? Is it becoming clearer why SAP and EMC might be collaborating on this type of service? It's pretty clear to me.

But what's missing? Why is this obvious scenario not already mainstream? To begin with, production implementation of virtual infrastructure is only now beginning to take hold. Historically, virtualization was used extensively in test and development or to curb Windows server sprawl (a condition that occurs because Windows cannot effectively host more than one application per OS instance). Now, enterprises are beginning to understand that virtualizing every application makes sense because it separates the evolution and maintenance of the application from the evolution of the hardware infrastructure.

For example, it makes much more sense to create a virtual appliance for an existing single-threaded application and run several instances on a dual socket, quad-core eight way machine than to attempt to re-write the application to take advantage of the quad-core threading model. There is no value in the re-write, and virtualization provides a means to scale the application to take advantage of modern hardware. Another obvious benefit of this separation of application and hardware is server maintenance. You can shutdown one virtual appliance to patch it and then spin it back up without disturbing any of the other virtual appliances running on that server. This approach minimizes application to OS conflicts, and it eliminates application to application conflicts.

If virtualized production infrastructure is a cloud requirement that is slowly becoming a reality, what other obstacles lay on the path to cloud nirvana? Well, the current most popular approach for virtualizing applications is building a working system from legacy components and then “snapshotting” it with your favorite physical to virtual (P2V) tool. This approach will not scale to cloud computing. First, it is unlikely that your cloud provider has a virtualized infrastructure that is identical to your own. Going through a manual, ad-hoc process to build snapshot images for each cloud is going to be slow, expensive, and prone to errors. Also, it is inevitable that cheap, variable cost computing is going to tempt enterprises to define ever increasing numbers of application images. However, the administration and maintenance burden of the legacy OS system layer is going to result in skyrocketing administration costs or a “don't patch it and hope for the best” security scenario. A new approach to system software that couples the application with just enough OS is a requirement to make cloud computing a scalable reality without untenable administration costs or security risks.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there needs to be some “context” language by which networks of virtual appliances communicate to the cloud their requirements for system resources, configuration, and service level. How does an application server communicate to the cloud to boot it on the same network segment as the database server it requires? How does a critical application that is CPU intensive communicate a requirement for 2 CPUs and 4 gigabytes of RAM? How do redundant application servers communicate a requirement to run on separate physical servers to preserve a failsafe capability?

An application architecture for cloud computing will take into consideration all of these current deficiencies. The application and all of its associated context information will be defined as virtual appliances and virtual appliance networks independent from the physical infrastructure. The general purpose OS will give way to a just enough OS approach to enable a more simple and scalable maintenance model. And there will emerge cloud release and service brokering systems for launching applications into the clouds at acceptable service level without error prone manual processes and extraordinary administration expenses. These changes are coming. What are you doing to get your enterprise on the path to cloud computing?

Intel Invests Heavily in the Future of Operating Systems - VMware

Intel and VMware announced today that Intel Capital is making a $218M pre-IPO investment in VMware. This investment would give Intel a 2.5% ownership stake in VMware, with a board seat, but no real voting rights whatsoever (less than 1%) relative to VMware's parent company, EMC. So why might Intel be making such a significant investment in VMware? I believe it is because Intel plans to influence the outcome of the investment through its X86 distribution chain.

Sales of computers, especially server computers, are currently constrained by the complexity of software. Larry Ellison estimates that for every $1 in license spending for applications customers spend $6 in integration and maintenance expense. Not only is this complexity a drag on new license sales of software, it is also a drag on new sales of servers to run that software. What if a technology existed that could eliminate the drag of integration and maintenance such that customers could spend more money on new applications and servers? Maybe Intel would be interested in seeing such a technology proliferate?

Well, VMware has that technology, and I believe Intel plans to integrate VMware's technology with it's chipsets such that applications can arrive as virtual appliances, attach to the system in a matter of seconds, and then be managed by the application provider as a complete system image instead of being managed by the customer as a set of “lincoln logs” to be assembled in a unique manner each time. With VMware hypervisor technology as the replacement for the bloated, “one size fits all” general purpose operating system, customers can actually take advantage of Moore's law instead of being held back by the lack of installability, maintainability, and portability of software applications.

How many times has the hardware sales rep been stymied in the sale of a hot new machine because the customer absolutely refused to touch the machine that was currently running their ERP/CRM/SCM/(pick your alphabet soup) application? They refused to touch it because once it was installed, configured, and stabilized no one wanted to repeat the hellish process that led to that stability.

Imagine the new world order with the hypervisor embedded at the chipset level as the replacement for the bloated general purpose operating system. You simply hook up power and networking to the new box, and then “vmotion” the system image on the old box over to the new box. And magically you now have X% more processing power, I/O, memory, or whatever you need on that fancy new box. Life doesn't get much better than that for a hardware sales guy or gal.

My bet is that you see Intel pushing their downstream server partners to adopt Intel chipsets that enable VMware hypervisor functionality at the level of the BIOS. Intel and its downstream partners such as IBM, Dell, and HP will develop system management technology along with vendors like Cisco, Symantec, and McAfee that enables “value added” services to also be delivered to the machine without the general purpose operating system getting in their way. You will see these supply chain partners develop virtual appliance catalogs that contain applications that can be added to the system in the same manner that you add songs to your iPod through iTunes. When software ceases to be a drag due to operating system complexity, hardware sales accelerate tremendously. All this for a measly investment of $218M. I think Intel got a great deal.

Licensing Hullabaloo

I love using the word “hullabaloo.” I don't get to use it often, but it is a great word to describe the cacophony of voices currently debating virtualization licensing practices.

It began with a New York Times article by Steve Lohr in which he described the competitive challenge that virtualization (and VMware) poses to Microsoft's operating system business. Then VMware posted a white-paper describing the licensing practices and their potential negative impact on customers. And Microsoft responded with a statement from Mike Neil, the General Manager of virtualization platforms for Microsoft. No doubt the analysts will begin weighing in on the matter soon. Why all the buzz? Why now? Because the impact of virtualization on the software industry promises to be similar to that of the Internet, and everyone wants to find a control point from which to steer their fortunes.

Virtualization is disruptive because it fundamentally changes the relationship between the hardware, the operating system that runs on the hardware, and the applications that run on the operating system. The hypervisor (virtualization platform) becomes the new layer on the hardware, and the operating system simply becomes an extension of the application as part of a software appliance. If the hypervisor becomes the “new” standard operating system, and any application can run on the hypervisor as a software appliance, it stands to reason that Microsoft and the other big operating system vendors such as Red Hat would be threatened by this change because they lose their point of control – how applications get attached to computers.

But what does all this have to do with licensing? Historically, there has been a strong correlation between the number of physical computers owned by a customer and the number of operating system licenses that a customer required. With virtualization, it is conceivable that every application is a software appliance with its own operating system attached. Moreover, these software appliances might come and go on the network based upon demand for the application. For example, a payroll application might run for a couple of days every month, but otherwise, it is not needed. With software appliances, the payroll software appliance would be deployed to a computer (atop the hypervisor) to run during the days before payday, and then be removed from the machine to make room for other applications to run more speedily during the rest of the month. Should the customer pay for a “full time” license to the operating system that is inside the payroll software appliance? Or should they have a “part time” license that more closely reflects the manner in which they use the payroll software appliance?

There is a lot at stake here for Microsoft. If the hypervisor becomes the “full time” operating system on the hardware that enables the “part time” software appliances to arrive and run as needed, Microsoft surely wants that hypervisor to be a Microsoft product, not one from VMware. If the operating system in the software appliances is simply an extension of an application, Microsoft may experience price erosion due to the minimalist nature of the operating system and the “part time” usage scenario.

In any case, Microsoft has a right to license their technology in any manner they see fit, so long as it does not break the law. If the licensing is not in the best interest of customers, customers will vote with their wallets and seek alternatives. Best of all for me, it gives an opportunity to use a great word like “hullabaloo” to describe the ruckus.