Cloud Computing Knowledge Circle Vol 1 Issue 3
Evalueserve’s Stairway to the Cloud Contents Evalueserve’s Stairway to the Cloud.................2 The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing........4 The Economics of the Cloud….............6
Sachin Jain, CIO, Evalueserve
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CIO
Insights
Evalueserve’s Stairway to the Cloud
Strategy for Cloud Computing Adoption
The core
The move to the Cloud
Evalueserve is a leading player in the KPO domain. The organization provides custom research and analytics services to clients across the globe. The high-end research work adds value to their clients in knowledge management and needs to be meticulously delivered.
Seeking a solution for IT consistency across Evalueserve’s geographicallydispersed office locations, Jain leveraged “co-located data centers” in the US. “We host most of our applications on these public-domain servers, both for internal use, as well as for our clients.” It started with Rackspace in the year 2000, because Jain did not want heavy investments in infrastructure at the time. With steady growth, came more applications, web portals, and IT solutions for clients, with more than 20 servers being used for internal and client consumption at present. A dedicated software team supports the customer intelligence portals (research dashboards, tools, and
Says Jain, “We operate from five research offices, two in Gurgoan, and one each in China, Romania, and Chile. Of the 2100 users globally, 1700 operate from India. We need to ensure seamless IT systems, connectivity and infrastructure across all these locations – whether it is the intranet, instant messenger, email or video-conferencing, etc.”
Sachin Jain, CIO, Evalueserve isn’t new to the benefits of Cloud computing. The clouds lured him in the nineties and now, the pull is no less. The young CIO is clearly an old hand at determining what drives his business. In the past, he has leveraged outsourced IT services in the public domain successfully. Today, Jain is all set to adopt the Cloud yet again, with a well thought of strategy and delivery plan. Here is the detail of that journey.
websites) hosted on these servers, to provide IT services to clients, “In effect, it has been a mix of PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS, that we have been using for over a decade. In the present scenario, this is a structured offering and has taken the shape of the Cloud.”
The upward pull For Jain, the attraction has always been cost and manageability; apart from other value adds and bundling of services. To him, a Cloud strategy begins with the decision on whether an organization really needs one. “It is totally requirement driven. Immediate advantages stem as soon as you do a cost-benefit analysis – for companies who do not want to invest in people and infrastructure, you get to pay for what you use. There is no need to build your own infrastructure and recruit people to manage it. Of course, if you have a large operational set up, Cloud adoption may take some time.”
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experience it. Start with a small strategy. If it works, fly with it, else drop the idea!”
I started by identifying what I can move first. The logical choice was to look at moving what is already in the public domain i.e. the co-located data centers. I am managing three services from there and paying for it, so I can certainly move that… most of the applications have been developed in .NET and can be moved to the Azure platform easily. Moreover, end users are already used to a certain type of response from these applications and it will not impact end user experience” adds Jain. Further, Evalueserve is also looking to create a Private Cloud for internal use. This can be accessed by all their offices, in and outside India. “Starting with virtualization, we will create a Cloud for our software team, internal applications, business groups, and for customized reporting.Computing power consumed will be metered and capacity utilization will be measured. We will follow this by a Public Cloud of sorts, for all Evalueserve’s clients. In effect, the organization will leverage a hybrid model, adopted over a period of six months.
Stopovers on the climb Jain’s critical success factors in the climb to the Cloud include performance and security. – in our industry, we need a water-tight solution in terms of performance and security. “Productivity and efficiency are pre-defined numbers in our industry, as we bill clients on an hourly basis.”
Another determinant is the maturity of the solution. Therefore, Evalueserve’s adoption will begin with moving the less critical applications first – research portals, websites, and partner, branch, and reseller portals, etc. The critical applications such as ERP, and business-critical apps related to analytics and business intelligence, would only come next. The big advantage of the move however, would be the IT helpdesk service management from the Cloud providers. Not to mention, licenses for the general risk and compliance dashboards, which the Cloud vendor would take care of. Adds Jain, “We won’t need to manage day-to-day operations, hardware and software licenses, etc. as it is all there on the Windows Azure platform. In the co-located data centers, I needed to take care of all this, including patches and firewalling. Moreover, I had the onus of paying a fixed monthly charge, irrespective of use. With the Cloud, it is like an electricity meter that ticks as per use.” Given the nature of his industry, Jain’s big deciding factors however, still remain his clients and their acceptance of Public Cloud for their BI portals. This is specially relevant for financial services companies.
Soaring high While Jain is optimistic himself, he wants other CIOs to cut the waiting time too, “Don’t wait and watch,
In line with Evaluserve’s business philosophy, a strategic adoption would be incomplete without the business analytics to support the case… so Jain is gung-ho on collecting results from the word go – performance, adoption rate, utilization, change management effort, and what have you. Certainly, a well planned strategy that hopes to ‘serve value’ to the business.
Step by step: 1. At all times, ensure seamless IT systems and connectivity 2. Ask yourself why you really need a Cloud strategy 3. Determine what can be moved to the Public Cloud first (ideally public domain or less critical applications) 4. Consider setting up a Private Cloud for more critical internal applications 5. Ensure change management and user experience at all times
Reap the benefits: 1. Reduced manpower costs 2. IT services manageability 3. Pay per use model
Ask for: 1. Performance and security 2. Productivity and efficiency 3. Maturity of solution
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Back to
Basics
The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing A whitepaper by Peter Mell and Tim Grance Note 1: Cloud computing is still an evolving paradigm. Its definitions, use cases, underlying technologies, issues, risks, and benefits will be refined in a spirited debate by the public and private sectors. These definitions, attributes, and characteristics will evolve and change over time. Note 2: The Cloud computing industry represents a large ecosystem of many models, vendors, and market niches. This definition attempts to encompass all of the various cloud approaches. Definition of Cloud Computing: Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models. Essential Characteristics: On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities,
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such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service’s provider.
quickly scale in. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time.
Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, laptops, and PDAs).
Measured Service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction, appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.
Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth, and virtual machines. Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in some cases automatically, to quickly scale out and rapidly released to
Service Models: Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a Cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through a thin client interface such as a web browser (e.g., webbased email). The consumer does not manage or control the underlying Cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited userspecific application configuration settings.
Essential Characteristics
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Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the Cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying Cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly, application hosting environment configurations. Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer
does not manage or control the underlying Cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and possibly, limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls). Deployment Models: Private Cloud. The Cloud infrastructure is operated solely for an organization. It may be managed by the organization or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise. Community Cloud. The Cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be managed by the organizations or a third party and may exist on premise or off premise.
Cloud So Servfitware as a ce (S aaS) Cloud Pla S e r v it f o r m a s a ce (P aaS) Cloud Infras tru Servicture as a ce (Ia aS)
te Clo ud unity Cloud Publi c Clo ud Hybri d Clo ud
Deployment Models
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Public Cloud. The Cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization selling Cloud services. Hybrid Cloud. The Cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more Clouds (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., Cloud bursting for load-balancing between clouds). Note: Cloud software takes full advantage of the Cloud paradigm by being service oriented with a focus on statelessness, low coupling, modularity, and semantic interoperability. Peter Mell and Tim Grance National Institute of Standards and Technology, Information Technology Laboratory
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Analyst
Speak
The Economics of the Cloud Excerpts from a report with the same title by Rolf Harms and Michael Yamartino, Microsoft
Economics of the Cloud The emergence of Cloud services is again fundamentally shifting the economics of IT. Cloud technology standardizes and pools IT resources and automates many of the Iaas
Applications
Applications
Middleware O/S Virtualization Servers Storage Networking
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Supply-side savings. Large-scale data centers (DCs) lower costs per server. l Demand-side aggregation. Aggregating demand for computing smooths overall variability, allowing server utilization rates to increase. l Multi-tenancy efficiency. When changing to a multitenant application model, increasing the number of tenants (i.e., customers or users) lowers the application management and server cost per tenant. Supply-Side Economies of Scale Cloud computing combines the best
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Traditional IT
The Cloud also allows core IT infrastructure to be brought into large data centers that take advantage of significant economies of scale in three areas:
O/S Virtualization Servers
Delivered as a service
Today, IT is going through a similar change: the shift from client/server to the Cloud. Cloud promises not just cheaper IT, but also faster, easier, more flexible, and more effective IT.
maintenance tasks done manually today. Cloud architectures facilitate elastic consumption, self-service, and pay-as-you-go pricing.
You manage
Introduction When cars emerged in the early 20th century, people were sceptical at first. Banks claimed that, “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad�. By the 1920s, the number of cars had already reached 8 million, and today there are over 600 million cars. What the early pioneers failed to realize was that profound reductions in both cost and complexity of operating cars and a dramatic increase in its importance in daily life would overwhelm prior constraints and bring cars to the masses.
Middleware O/S Virtualization Servers
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economic properties of mainframe and client/server computing. Cloud computing in fact offers users economies of scale and efficiency that exceed those of a mainframe, coupled with modularity and agility beyond what client/server technology offered, thus eliminating the tradeoff. The economies of scale emanate from the following areas: l Cost of power. Large providers can pay by locating DCs in locations with inexpensive electricity supply and through bulk purchase agreements. l Infrastructure labor costs. While a single system administrator can service approximately 140 servers in a traditional enterprise, in a Cloud DC the same administrator can service thousands of servers. l Security and reliability. While often cited as a potential hurdle to public Cloud adoption, increased need for security and reliability leads to economies of scale due to the largely fixed level of investment required. l Buying power. Operators of large DCs can get discounts on hardware purchases of up to 30 percent over smaller buyers. This has enabled standardization of hardware and software architectures. Going forward, there are likely to be many additional economies of scale that we cannot yet foresee. The industry is at the early stages of building DCs at a scale we‘ve never seen before.
We distinguish five sources of variability: 1. Randomness. To meet service level agreements, capacity buffers have to be built in to account for a certain probability that many people will undertake particular tasks at the same time. 2. Time-of-day patterns. Capacity has to be built to account for these daily peaks but will go unused during other parts of the day causing low utilization. 3. Industry-specific variability. The common result is that capacity has to be built for the expected peak (plus a margin of error). Most of this capacity will sit idle the rest of the time. 4. Multi-resource variability. While it‘s possible to adjust capacity by buying servers optimized for CPU or storage, this addresses the issue only to a limited degree because it will reduce flexibility and may not be economic from a capacity perspective. 5. Uncertain growth patterns. While it‘s possible to adjust capacity by buying servers optimized for CPU or storage, this addresses the
issue only to a limited degree because it will reduce flexibility and may not be economic from a capacity perspective.
A key economic advantage of the Cloud is its ability to address variability in resource utilization brought on by these factors. By pooling resources, variability is diversified away, evening out utilization patterns. The larger the pool of resources, the smoother the aggregate demand profile, the higher the overall utilization rate, and the cheaper and more efficiently the IT organization can meet its end-user demands. Diversifying Random Variability 100%
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Clouds will be able to reduce time-ofday variability to the extent that they are diversified amongst geographies and workload types. Within an average organization, peak IT usage can be twice as high as the daily average. Microsoft services such as Windows Live Hotmail and Bing take advantage of multi-resource diversification by layering different sub-services to optimize workloads with different resource profiles (such as CPU bound or storage bound). So far we have made the implicit assumption that the degree of variability will stay the same as we move to the Cloud. In reality, it is likely that the variability will significantly increase, which will further increase economies of scale. There are two reasons why this may happen:
l Higher expectation of performance. l Batch processes will become real time.
We note that even the largest public Clouds will not be able to diversify away all variability; market level variability will likely remain. Demand management will further increase the economic benefits of Cloud. Multi-tenancy Economies of Scale There is another important source of economies of scale that can be harnessed only if the application is written as a multitenant application. This has two important economic benefits: l Fixed application labor amortized over a large number of customers. This can result in a meaningful reduction in overall cost, especially for complex applications. l Fixed component of server utilization amortized over large number of customers. By moving to a multitenant model with a single instance, the resource overhead can be amortized across all customers. Applications can be entirely multitenant by being completely written to take advantage of these benefits, or can achieve partial multi-tenancy by leveraging shared services provided by the Cloud platform. The greater the use of such shared services, the greater the application will benefit from these multi-tenancy economies of scale. Economies of Scale in the Cloud $5,000
TCO/ Server (at average utilization)
Virtualization enables multiple applications to run on a single physical server within the optimized operating system instance, so the primary benefit of virtualization is that fewer servers are needed to carry the same number of workloads. But how will this affect economies of scale?
Average Utilization Rate
Demand-Side Economies of Scale The overall cost of IT is determined not just by the cost of capacity, but also by the degree to which the capacity is efficiently utilized. We need to assess the impact that demand aggregation will have on costs of actually utilized resources (CPU, network, and storage).
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Overall Impact The combination of supply-side economies of scale in server capacity (amortizing costs across more servers), demand-side aggregation of workloads (reducing variability), and the multi-tenant application model (amortizing costs across multiple customers) leads to powerful economies of scale. This raises the question: what impact will the Cloud Economics we described have on the IT budget? From customer data, we know the approximate breakdown between the infrastructure costs, costs of supporting and maintaining existing applications, and new application development costs. Cloud impacts all three of these areas. The supply-side and demandside savings impact mostly the infrastructure portion, which
IT Spending Breakdown 11% 36%
New App Development Existing App Maintenance
53%
Infrastructure
Current IT spending
comprises over half of spending. Existing app maintenance costs account for roughly a third of spending and are addressed by the multi-tenancy efficiency factor. New application development accounts for just over a tenth of spending, even though it is seen as the way for IT to innovate. Therefore IT leaders generally want to increase spending here. The economic benefits of Cloud computing described here will enable this by freeing up room in the budget to do so.
Enterpise Cloud Assessment Workshop Microsoft now offers CIOs the opportunity to have a deep-dive session with Cloud consulting experts from leading firms such as KPMG, Mindtree, Persistent Systems, and Wipro, among others. You receive an in-depth assessment of applications in your environment, which are best fit for leveraging the Cloud to streamline your IT infrastructure; and a welldefined roadmap for migration to the Cloud. For Enterprise Cloud Assessment Workshop, please email azurepro@ microsoft.com or visit http://www.microsoft. com/india/azure
From the Team at CCKC The third issue of CCKC introduces CIOs to the importance of a step-by-step approach to the Cloud, as Sachin Jain from Evalueserve shares his Cloud strategy with us. Interesting facets emerge every day indeed, as CIOs step in the clouds. These real-life examples of IT heads deploying exciting Cloud offerings and reaping benefits in return, are gold nuggets in a fast-maturing space where any knowledge and precedents are welcome. So, we hope you enjoy reading this story. Further in the newsletter, we unveil the economics of the Cloud and its deployment nuances. This issue also throws light on the definitions of the Cloud, as per NIST. The space is clearly evolving at a rapid pace and we promise to keep bringing you exciting stories every month. For further information, feedback and suggestions on the Cloud Computing Knowledge Circle, mail cckc@cioindia.org.
Tapan Garg Founder and CEO CIO Association of India P1, Gem Wellington Old Airport Road Bangalore 560017 E: tapan@cioindia.org W: www.cioindia.org
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