A Scalable,Cloud-based Enterprise Messaging and Collaboration Email Solution

- Gina Murphy, Executive Vice President, Sales Enablement and Strategy, TriCore Solutions, says: 

We have partnered with Mimecast, the leading supplier of cloud-based email archiving, security and continuity services for Microsoft Exchange, to deliver a scalable cloud-based enterprise messaging and collaboration email solution. Through this partnership, we now provide customers a fully managed, cloud-based messaging and collaboration service combining industry-leading security, continuity and archiving with the managed infrastructure and administration support for its Microsoft Exchange environment. 

Customers are looking for ways to reduce the complexity of users’ email infrastructure as well as reduce the cost and intricacy of secure accessible email.  The benefit of doing this is a more efficient, easier to run corporate email environment. This new TriCore service is the only cloud-based solution that automatically steps in to deliver email to end users during planned and unplanned outages of a corporate email service, bringing a complete managed messaging service. The result is a complete solution to unify disparate and fragmented email functions which supports customers’ Exchange environment and is fully supported and managed by TriCore.

Messaging and Collaboration services provided through this partnership include:

• Email Security: A massively scalable mail transfer agent (MTA) with multiple layers of malware and spam protection providing 100% Virus protection, 98% Spam protection and 0.0001% Spam false positives. 
• Email Continuity:  Cloud based solution that automatically initiates mail delivery during planned and unplanned outages providing 100% service availability. 
• Email Archiving:  A secure, infinitely scalable cloud-based archive solution that can significantly reduce the complexity of your email infrastructure. 
• Hosting Infrastructure: that is robust, scalable, and employs the latest in security and reliability. Includes hardware, networking, OS, storage, backups, and security.
• TriCore Trusted Support- Our global support team is empowered to serve and support your business 24x7x365 with complete transparency at all levels without surprises or hidden costs.

Latest Trends in Cloud Computing 2013

- Deney Dentel, CEO at Nordisk Systems, Inc, says:

Cloud computing has transformed the disaster recovery process by making it faster, cost efficient and an achievable information technology infrastructure for start-up businesses. The growth rate is steady and is continuous as per the market trends; this is now becoming the trending method used in thousands of organizations as a way of recovering data. It offers a lot of benefits that creates a feeling of peace and assuredness when it involves data that which is lost and can be easily recovered.

Subscription: It has three distinct features that which includes, it is sold on demand that is at any given time, it is elastic this means that a user may choose to have little or a lot of service at any given time and that the service offered is managed by the provider. This is a subscription of dynamically scalable and virtualized resources that mostly is provided over the internet. Security is the top most concern for organizations that are planning on moving on to cloud computing as their data recovery solution.

Recovery Services: Cloud computing takes a different approach to disaster recovery by backing up your data offsite and recovering of the data at a faster pace. With virtualization the entire server which is inclusive of the operating system is encapsulated into one virtual server which is later copied to an offsite data centre in a matter of minutes. Due to the independence of the virtual server data is accurately and safely transferred from one data source centre to the next source centre.

Specific Designs: This recovery services reduces the recovery times in comparison to non-virtualized approaches where the services are loaded with the operating system and the application software. It is later on patched to the configuration that is used in production before the information may be restored. One specific design of disaster recovery in cloud computing is its ability to deliver a multi-site availability.

It gives large companies room for business continuity and comprehensive plans in place by backing up data to a remote site. This tends to be beneficial from a financial perspective line of view to the organizations that have sophisticated disaster recovery architecture and strategies. These organizations do need to come up with an integrated strategy of processes, reports that are necessary and architectures so as to show their capability to the auditors.

Security: A recently added benefit of the disaster recovery system is its capability to perform and tune the cost associated with the service for the data recovery platform. One can tune it down with less resource to those applications that are seen as being less critical in a disaster. This can only be done while assuming the fact that most critical applications get the resources that they need to ensure that the business runs smoothly through any disaster.

Hoarding: Businesses at times tend to not have the time, capacity and resources to come up with an effective backup strategy for data. Using this service will secure and protect all your data. Cloud computing services have been customized to either manual or automatic backup of data with hoarding becoming less of a problem.

Author Bio:

Deney Dentel is the CEO at Nordisk Systems, Inc., a managed and cloud computing service provider company in Portland, OR. Deney is the only localised and authorised  IBM business partner in Pacific Northwest. You can also follow him on LinkedIn.

Fine-Tuning Server Utilization In A Cloud Environment

- Bret Clement, head of global communications for RightScale, says: 

As Brian Adler, senior cloud solutions architect at RightScale recently wrote in his blog entitled “20 Ways to Fine-Tune Your Cloud Environment,” cloud deployments require tune-ups.  Why? Over time cloud deployments grow organically in ways that you never plan. Sometimes you have to do things quickly to solve an immediate issue and you never go back and do it by the book – and when things are working, there’s a tendency not to mess with them. A tune-up of your cloud environment can potentially save you money and improve your performance.

Brian looked at 20 great ways organizations can fine-tune cloud environments across cost optimization, HA/DR and server utilization.
Brian offers these tips for server utilization and HA/DR.

Server Utilization

Server utilization is where you’re likely to find the greatest amount of inefficiency. Overutilized resources may generate alerts that require your attention, but you can also save money by reconfiguring underutilized resources that keep running even when they’re not necessary.

1. Size Instances Appropriately
Choose a correctly sized instance for the task at hand, perhaps via load testing. You don’t want servers to be overused, and you don’t want them to be underutilized. Put alerts in place that tell you when your instance is struggling so you can adjust your instance configuration if you need to.

2. Spread the CPU Load
If your instances have multi-core CPUs, specify CPU affinity or use irqbalance and spread the load across the cores when your applications lend themselves to that, or when you’re running multiple processes on the same instance. You have paid for those cores, so you might as well use them.

3. Check Your Memory and Load Average
Ideally you should run at 70 to 80 percent of memory consumed. Load average should run slightly under 1.0 times the number of cores in your instance.

4. Use Monitoring and Alerts
Cloud monitoring and alerts can help you discover small problems before they become big ones. Look for trends and act on them, rather than waiting for spikes or anomalies. To save money, look for underutilization as well as overutilization.

HA/DR

1.  Avoid Single Points of Failure
Place one of each component, such as load balancers, application servers, and databases, in at least two zones. Replicate data across zones for HA, and back up or replicate across regions to enable failover for DR. You can use RightScale to alert you to problems and automate resolution or failover processes.
As Brian concludes, it is important for many reasons to clean up cloud deployment sprawl. In terms of server performance, you have a lot to gain.

About the Author: Bret Clement heads global communications for RightScale. 


Cross Posted from the RightScale Cloud Management Blog

Cloud Scaling: Three Ways To Be Smarter About IT

- Ray Solnik, President, Appnomic Systems, says:

Despite the progress so far, capitalizing on Cloud remains a vast open field ahead and a tough challenge for many. Can it be reliable enough, fast enough, secure enough, affordable enough or scale enough?

Few Cloud providers are providing visibility and solid, measurable, validated proof of their performance. Of course, we hear about the major outages by Amazon, Netflix and others, but there’s more going on behind the curtains than these major events.

To truly achieve the potential of Cloud systems and applications, the IT/Web Operations function needs to get better at focusing on what’s happening in the application layer and then down into the data center stack. Static monitoring of data center devices and then up the stack from lower layers is no longer going to cut it in the new Cloud paradigm.

Monitoring and analyzing performance from the application perspective, end user experience down into the data center, is now the best way to ensure Cloud apps are managed effectively and efficiently – preserving the bottom line while serving users. YES, the Cloud is actually turning out to be pretty expensive if improperly managed. 

To meet customer expectations and achieve the potential of the Cloud, application owners may now leverage advanced analytics to help determine when an app stack, along with underlying data center resources, must scale up to adequately serve customers and then scale down to preserve budgets. Advanced analytics can now also help identify issues before they become real IT “accidents.”

Read on to hear about three key ways to be proactive and smart in the Cloud – leveraging this top down approach and advanced analytics:

Link scaling management to ROI analytics

Scalability is intrinsically linked to ROI. Often this painful realization occurs when Cloud service invoices highlight that Cloud under-utilized resources left “on” are significantly more expensive than effective resource self-management.

Instead, organizations should be moving towards elastically managing resources, automatically scaling up with peak demand and down during low-usage. 

With advanced analytics, forward thinking operators can even crank up performance, for example, when a new online advertising campaign drives traffic to a website and the website wants to provide as good an experience as possible for end users interacting at the application layer. This approach maximizes customer conversions and can lead to better customer loyalty over time as well – both, huge drivers of ROI.

Fire prevention is infinitely better than fire fighting

Preventing fires instead of fighting them requires Monitoring + Analytics + Automation. This combination is now available and ready for commercial application from a variety of vendors.

Advanced analytics are enabling web operations teams to operate with a MTTP (More Time to Prevent) IT “accidents” vs. a reactive MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) approach which focuses on putting out fires once an incident has occurred.

Advanced analytics run on real-time monitoring can implement sophisticated, yet actionable pattern matching to find deviations in production environments and help IT professionals get in front of issues before they turn into “accidents.” In many cases, systems can also be configured to then automate a remediation.

With MTTP operations, downtime is dramatically reduced and cost savings range from 30-50%. It also turns out customers are more loyal and happier as they are calling and complaining less frequently about application slowness, outages, and the like.

Be smart so both IT and the bottom line win the war

These Advanced or “Big Data” Analytics deliver impressive results in saving critical IT time and positively affecting a business’ top and bottom line.  While it’s early for this market, real results are beginning to be achieved in large, enterprise and Cloud data center environments. 

Think about it, if effective operations analytics can prevent a single failure to critical applications, the cost to get there is probably worth many times the original investment. IT resources are freed up and businesses can provide premium user experiences.

Gartner has recently launched coverage for a software category for Big Data Analytics that they call IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) and they are forecasting this category of software will permeate web and enterprise IT operations over the next five years – in the order of $2 billion.

Cloud scalability is not just about providing more data, applications and services, it’s about being smart about how you do it. And locating and preventing potential “fires” is critical in any enterprise IT environment, but especially in the Cloud. While it’s still early, it is certainly time to get flying on smart analytics for your data center operation.

As president of Appnomic Systems, Ray has P & L responsibility with a focus on business growth in North America. He brings to Appnomic twenty years of experience in cloud computing, managed network services, and data communications. Prior to Appnomic, Ray was president and COO of OpSource, an early SaaS/IaaS provider, which was acquired and is now the core Cloud offering of Dimension Data - a $4 billion systems integrator. Ray has helped multiple next generation companies develop and drive strategies resulting in successful fundraising from top venture capital investors, including Gengo, PowerCloud Systems, and CrowdFlower. Earlier in his career, Ray was chief development officer of New Edge Networks (acquired by EarthLink), and president of AT&T’s consumer Internet services business, AT&T WorldNet. He has a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He lives in Silicon Valley.

OpenStack's Third Birthday - a Recap with a Look into the Future

- Nati Shalom – CTO, GigaSpacesTechnologies, says:

OpenStack was first announced three years ago at the OSCON conference in Portland. I remember the first time I heard about the announcement and how it immediately caught my attention. Ever since that day, I have become a strong advocate of the technology. Looking back, I thought that it would be interesting to analyze why.

Is it the fact that it's an open source cloud? Well partially, but that couldn't be the main reason. OpenStack was not the first open source cloud initiative; we had Eucalyptus, then later Cloud.com and other open source cloud initiatives before OpenStack emerged.

There were two main elements missing from these previous open source cloud initiatives: the companies behind the initiatives and the commitment to a true open movement. It was clear to me that a true open source cloud movement could not turn into an industry movement, and thus meet its true potential if it was led by startups. In addition, the fact that companies whose businesses run cloud services, such as Rackspace, brought its own experience in the field and a large scale consumer of such infrastructure such as NASA, gave OpenStack a much better starting point. Also, knowing some of the main individuals behind the initiatives and their commitment to the Open Cloud made me feel much more confident that the OpenStack project would have a much higher chance for success than its predecessors. Indeed, after three years, it is now clear that the game is essentially over and it is apparent who is going to win the open source cloud war. I'm happy to say that I also had my own little share in spreading the word by advocating the OpenStack movement in our own local community which also grew extremely quickly over the past two years.

OpenStack as an Open Movement

Paul Holland, an Executive Program Manager for Cloud at HP, gave an excellent talk during the last OpenStack Summit, comparing the founding of the OpenStack Foundation to the establishment of the United States. Paul drew interesting parallelization between the factors that brought a group of thirteen individual states to unite and become the empire of today, with that of OpenStack.

Paul also drew an interesting comparison between the role of the common currency that fostered the open market and trade between the different states with its OpenStack equivalent: APIs, common language, processes, etc. Today, we take those things for granted, but the reality is that common currency isn't yet trivial in many countries even today, yet we cannot imagine what our global economy would look like without the Dollar as a common currency or English as a common language, even if they have not been explicitly chosen as such by all countries.

As individuals, we often tend to gloss over the details of the Foundation and its governing body, but it is those details that make OpenStack an industry movement that has brought many large companies, such as Red Hat, HP, IBM, Rackspace and many others (57 in total as of today), to collaborate and contribute to a common project as noted in this report. Also, the fact that the number of individual developers has been growing steadily year after year is another strong indication of the real movement that this project has created.

Thinking Beyond Amazon AWS

OpenStack essentially started as the open source alternative to Amazon AWS. Many of the sub-projects often began as Amazon equivalents. Today, we are starting to see projects with a new level of innovation that do not have any AWS equivalent. The most notable one IMHO is the Neutron (network) and BareMetal projects. Both have huge potential to disrupt how we think about cloud infrastructure.

Only on OpenStack

We often tend to compare OpenStack with other clouds on a feature-to-feature basis.

The open source and community adoption nature of OpenStack enables us to do things that are unique to OpenStack and cannot be matched by other clouds. Here are a few examples:

Run the same infrastructure on private and public clouds.

Work with multiple cloud providers; have more than one OpenStack-compatible cloud provider with which to work.

Plug in different HW as cloud platforms for private clouds from different vendors, such as HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, or use pre-packaged OpenStack distributions, such as the one from Ubuntu, Red Hat, Piston etc.

Choose your infrastructure of choice for storage, network etc, assuming that many of the devices come with OpenStack-supported plug-ins.

All this can be done only on OpenStack; not just because it is open source, but primarily because of the level of adoption of OpenStack that has made it the de-facto industry standard.

Re-think the Cloud Layers

When cloud first came into the world, it was common to look at the stack from a three-layer approach: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

Typically, when we designed each of the layers, we looked at the other layers as *black-boxes* and often had to create parallel stacks within each layer to manage security, metering, high availability etc.

The fact that OpenStack is an open source infrastructure allows us to break the wall between those layers and re-think where we draw the line. For example, when we design our PaaS on OpenStack, there is no reason why we wouldn't reuse the same security, metering, messaging and provisioning that is used to manage our infrastructure. The result is a much thinner and potentially more efficient foundation across all the layers that is easier to maintain. The new Heat project and Ceilometer in OpenStack are already starting to take steps in this direction and are, therefore, becoming some of the most active projects in the upcoming Havana release of OpenStack.

Looking Into the Future

Personally, I think that the world with OpenStack is by far healthier and brighter for the entire industry, as opposed to a world in which we are dependent on one or two major cloud providers, regardless of how good of a job they may or may not do. There are still many challenges ahead in turning all this into a reality and we are still at the beginning. The good news, though, is that there is a lot of room for contribution and, as I’ve witnessed myself, everyone can help shape this new world that we are creating.

OpenStack Birthday Events

To mark OpenStack’s 3^rd Birthday, there will be a variety of birthday celebrations taking place around the world. At the upcoming OSCON event in Portland from July 22-26, OpenStack will host their official birthday party on July 24^th. There will also be a celebration in Israel on the 21^st, marking the occasion in Tel Aviv.

For more information about the Foundation’s birthday celebrations, visit their website at www.openstack.org.

G-Cloud iii silver lining for Ark

- Steve Hall, Executive Sales Director, Ark Data Centres, says:

The announcement of the latest iteration of G-Cloud – G-Cloud iii - saw Ark selected to provide its high security, low carbon solutions as part of the framework.

The news came as the Public Expenditure Cabinet Committee’s confirmed its agreement to put in place a Public Cloud First mandate for central government, a move welcomed by the company.

Ark has been selected to supply specialist Cloud Services (under Lot 4) allowing public sector organisations to purchase data centre services with the minimum of disruption, quickly and easily via the CloudStore.

Stephen Hall, Sales & Marketing Director of Ark, said: “We are naturally looking forward to supporting public sector customers who are seeking expertise not only operation excellence, but highly secure, low carbon and cost-effective data centre and cloud solutions through the G-Cloud framework.”

Ark’s data centres, known as Arks, are modular, tailored or bespoke facilities with infrastructure solutions to meet the exact requirements of the customer. The business was established in 2005 and currently operates the UK’s most efficient data centre facilities across two campuses in the South of England. Headquarters is in Corsham, Wiltshire and the other location is Farnborough, Hampshire.

Following recapitalisation of the business last year, Ark has seen the appointment of a new senior leadership team, with Huw Owen as CEO. It comes during a time of continued growth in personal and corporate data storage, big data analytics, cloud computing and technology services, particularly where efficiency and security are key requirements. 

Superfast Broadband

DCP Original. Ah – good ole’ business-grade broadband - that ability to transport multiple traffic types and signals at the same time, very quickly. According to the research firm, Ovum, by 2015, 3.6 billion people will be able to access broadband Internet services. That’s half the world! And countries like the UK are already providing fibre optic broadband, like BT superfast broadband.

Today’s businesses are relying heavily on high-capacity bandwidth and Internet connectivity. The benefits? Improving productivity, the move to cloud-based IT services, and growth. Technology infrastructure is a major factor in economic growth, as businesses decide where to locate their offices (network connectivity is a major decision criterion).

Over the last year and a half, small and mid-sized businesses have shifted from servers and storage in their local office, to outsourcing their IT infrastructure entirely. The cloud and IT-services need high-performance networks, and Ethernet services play a key role when customers need to connect to the data center.

How fast is fast?

Well, during the first quarter of this year, the global average Internet connection speed grew to 3.1 Mbps (a 17% jump over the previous year – according to a recent report from Akamai). During this quarter, the average broadband speed in the U.S was 8.6 Mbps (a 27% jump over the previous year). Who grew faster than the U.S.? The Czech Republic (34%) and  Sweden (32%).

It’s no secret that business-grade broadband is putting small and mid-sized businesses in the fast lane. You get superfast speeds and reliable connectivity (99.99% of the time), and it’s usually hassle-free installation! You also get more done, vastly improve your cloud computing, become more innovative, and save more money! Superfast broadband can make working remotely easier, so you can hire the best people to do the best job, working the hours they need to, from the location they need to.

Enabling Cloud Security with Trustworthy Systems

- Evelyn de Souza, Senior Data Center Security Strategist , CISCO SYSTEMS, INC, says:

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has defined cloud computing as: “[a] model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

This shared pool of computing resources allows an organization to use cloud services on an as-needed basis. Rather than having internal servers capable of meeting peaks in demand, which then run at 20-30 percent capacity at other times, an organization can use cloud services at peak times and/or when it needs extra computing capacity.

Ultimately, economics will compel a company to turn to cloud services. At this point, however, many organizations share concerns about the security of the cloud.

Security Challenges of the Cloud

Society depends on a growing diversity of complex networks for its very existence. As our global society continues to evolve, we create complex, networked technologies – such as the cloud – to meet changing needs. Yet with the success of cloud technologies, network security is challenged by threats such as piracy, the malicious modification or substitution of technology, misuse of intellectual property, and counterfeiting.

In the face of these threats, some organizations have hesitated to move toward the cloud. By storing data in the cloud, key components of the IT infrastructure are moved beyond the reach of internal IT personnel. In addition, organizations with regulatory compliance issues, such as the Payment Card Industry, may lose needed oversight of regulated data.  Finally, many IT teams hold concerns that the cloud infrastructure, to the extent that it is not monitored or maintained by internal IT personnel, may be at greater risk of unavailability (e.g., downtime) and/or nefarious actors accessing and harming the infrastructure.

Building Trust into the Cloud

The very nature of cloud computing means that an IT department – and by extension, the organization and end users – must trust that the cloud service provider has secured the entire supply chain, from the organization’s own vendors to the finished product. Without that level of trust, IT administrators often fear that with computing systems no longer under their control, they can’t attest that the infrastructure is running within certain geographic bounds, or even that the hardware is running as it is expected to.

These concerns can be satisfied by having trustworthy systems in place. First, trustworthy systems can provide attestation or assurance that workloads, services, and servers are running within certain geographic bounds. Second, because malware is increasingly going into the hardware layer and tampering with routers, there is no way of assuring security if services are running in the cloud; trustworthy systems principles can be used to provide assurance, and not just a state-in-time assurance, but continual assurances or real-time attestation that services are operating securely.

The cloud development community must have comprehensive and secure design principles and an understanding of secure coding practices. It must perform vulnerability testing and threat modeling and ensure that extensive product security requirements are met. These requirements create a framework from which competing cloud developers can build trustworthy systems.

The Right Reputation

Trusting a system means trusting the technologies on which it is built and the people who build those technologies. Due to past practices, limited resources, government requirements, experience, or business philosophies, not all vendors are qualified, willing, or able to develop trustworthy systems.

Vendors with proven track records, innovative security development, and the structure to support in a transparent manner international security efforts are often the best qualified to build trustworthy systems. When we choose a vendor for security and critical infrastructure, we often buy based on its technical qualifications and reputation. Lately, the vendor’s process and evolving security approach has become an increasingly important factor.

Trustworthy Cloud Provider Considerations

An organization should carefully vet prospective cloud service providers to ensure that best security practices are being followed.  Elements to validate include:

• The cloud provider’s reputation regarding trustworthiness
• The degree of visibility and control
• The extent to which real-time assurance regarding security can be provided

Looking to the Future

Fundamentally, a lack of trust has been holding back organizations from moving operations to the cloud more broadly. Thus, going forward, cloud security must have a system to alleviate a potential customer’s concerns regarding the lack of control over infrastructure and data. Simply put, a customer needs the same level of trust in the cloud infrastructure as it has behind the firewalls in its own enterprise.

For many, cloud adoption offers far too many benefits to be put off forever.  An organization interested in the cost savings to be gained through cloud computing can employ the best practices outlined above to vet the trustworthiness of a potential cloud partner.

Q&A with Colin Macnab, CEO and co-founder of AppEnsure

Can you tell us about AppEnsure and your most recent announcement?

AppEnsure is the first application management solution that automatically measures response time and throughput for all types of applications; custom developed and purchased, in physical, virtualized, public and private cloud environments. We recently announced the general availability of our application performance monitoring and management solutions, after a successful beta testing period.

Why is there a need for a product like AppEnsure?

With more companies adopting cloud infrastructures daily, the number of organizations moving from traditional physical infrastructures to cloud and virtualized environments has been steadily increasing. However, as the number of applications in these environments continues to grow, the root cause of performance issues are becoming difficult to pinpoint. This is due to limited operational visibility and ineffective legacy IT tools that do not have visibility of infrastructure in a virtualized computing environment or cloud. When applications slow down, end users do not have the tools to be productive, which leads to wasted time and often, a loss in revenue. We created AppEnsure to address these problems.

Tell us about how AppEnsure works.

AppEnsure provides App Ops with an application management solution that provides full traffic visibility, regardless of the type of application or environment. Its capabilities include automatic discovery of all applications and the topology mapping to the supporting infrastructure, in real-time. AppEnsure is able to quickly discover all types of applications by name and provide real-time, correlated, root cause analysis, providing actionable data when response time and throughput of an application declines. This enables IT to focus on proactively maintaining SLA’s and business performance, instead of searching for the root cause of a performance issue.

There are other application monitoring and management tools on the market. What makes AppEnsure different?

While there are a variety of APM tools on the market, AppEnsure is truly unique in its capabilities. Our differentiators include:

• Application agnostic – Most application management tools only work with custom applications; however, purchased applications make up most of the applications currently used by organizations, >90%. AppEnsure is able to automatically discover and monitor both types of applications, providing the visibility needed by IT to analyze and correct issues.
• Complete visibility of the application’s view of infrastructure – AppEnsure provides insight right from the application layer to the supporting infrastructure; servers, storage, network & services, which is a much broader scope than other tools.
• Storage traffic analysis – While most other application management tools don’t provide any storage traffic analysis, AppEnsure provides analysis from the application layer to Ethernet packets.

Although these features seem complex, we ensure that AppEnsure is easy to use and provides clear remedial steps to App Ops in just three clicks.

What industries are seeing the most benefit by using AppEnsure?

We believe that organizations with high volumes and high value transactions would most benefit from AppEnsure. Verticals include banking, legal, accounting, consulting and eCommerce firms – basically all an organizations’ mission critical applications.

How easy is it for new users to set up AppEnsure and start seeing results?

Our design goal for AppEnsure was to create a solution that is easy to try and use. The great thing about setting up AppEnsure is that after a one click download and install, there is absolutely no need for configuration, as we automatically discover applications and are continuously doing virtual and physical topology discovery, in real time. We have automated root cause analysis and provide simple remedial steps, thus simplifying application management for App Ops & IT.

Optimize Cloud Application Delivery and Simplify the Management of Cloud Environments

- Antonio Piraino, CTO, ScienceLogic:

At ScienceLogic we are constantly on the lookout for companies to partner with that will enhance our customers’ experience and improve their overall operations efficiency. Teaming up with New Relic to optimize cloud application delivery and simplify the management of cloud environments does just that. 

 While ScienceLogic provides cloud infrastructure management software, New Relic offers customers SaaS-based cloud application performance management (APM) technology. The partnership is really the coming together of two powerful platforms, both of which have tremendous momentum in the market due to their similar obsession with multi-tenancy; something that others in the market are just not able to get to at scale. The ability to offer both a top level view to individual developers and businesses leveraging the cloud, from a transactionary perspective, as well as the ability to optimize infrastructure health for those applications, means the threat of performance degradation has been cornered, and ops teams can move on to more innovative tasks.

 One customer already benefiting from the new partnership is Tier 3, a provider of cloud infrastructure and cloud management for enterprises. As the first customer to deploy the integrated solution, Tier 3 can deliver more powerful and flexible capabilities to customers as a native part of its cloud platform. Similarly, the integration arms customers with business-critical intelligence about applications and infrastructure running on Tier3’s innovative cloud platform, to the degree that they desire.

 Tier 3 offers varying levels of monitoring solutions to its end-customers, allowing them to opt in or out of advanced management tiers based on their contextual needs. Tier 3 offers a base tier consisting of monitoring that goes out with every single virtual machine that is deployed in the platform. A self-service model then allows customers to ratchet up or down tiers. Ultimately, this allows them greater control over what they are monitoring and associated actions to the alerts being received. 

 One of the other main benefits Tier 3 cites from the new partnership is that the company no longer has to invest time and money stitching together disparate components from different vendors to optimize its offering. With ScienceLogic and New Relic, they simply point and click for the analytics and data they need to run and improve the business; it’s clicks, not code.

Amazon Marketplace - Not a Fair Play, Thoughts on an Open Marketplace Alternative with OpenStack

- by Nati Shalom

The Promise of a Cloud Application Marketplace

The cloud has clearly emerged as the new world. Today, we find ourselves in an era of land-grabbing in which everyone wants the bigger piece of this new world.
Amazon has the advantage of being the first to grab. Others would like to follow in Amazon’s footsteps, but are met with the challenge of not being able to out-pace Amazon.
For those of us who aren’t Amazon, forming a coalition of some sort could be a good strategy.
One way of forming a coalition is through a marketplace, a system that enables faster growth through ecosystem partners.
A good example of how such a dynamic will work can be seen in today’s world of mobile applications. Both Apple and Google were able to create strong marketplaces that grow much faster than they would have organically and add significant stickiness to their platforms.

Challenges of Building a Marketplace – Lessons from the Mobile Application Marketplace

A marketplace can be an excellent strategy for forming a coalition of partners and growing your offering significantly faster than you would if you were to try to grow organically.
Having said that, there is a significant advantage to being the first. As we have seen in the mobile application world, others who have tried to build a similar marketplace to that of Google and Apple are facing significant difficulties in attracting partners to their marketplaces (See Microsoft Surface as an example).
The main reason for these challenges is the Chicken vs. the Egg problem. In other words, for any marketplace to work, two essential factors must be in place: suppliers and consumers. Apple and Google already had their consumer-base and, therefore, it was easier for them to attract suppliers. Microsoft, on the other hand, does not yet have the mobile consumer-base on its side and is therefore facing a hard battle to bring in the suppliers.

A Cloud Application Marketplace

A Cloud Application Marketplace is similar in concept to that of mobile applications, but aims at cloud data-center services such as Database services, Application Containers, Messaging, CMS, CRM etc which are deployed on a cloud.

Amazon Cloud Marketplace

The marketplace concept is nothing new to Amazon and is already running a successful marketplace for its eCommerce business.
It only made sense for Amazon to latch on that model and use it as a basis for building its Cloud Application Marketplace, as described here.

The Limitations of Amazon Marketplace

While the promise of the a Cloud Marketplace as an ecosystem play is a no-brainer, an over-simplified implementation of it can yield a diminishing return as noted in Janakiram MSV article AWS Marketplace – An Oversimplification of the Cloud? Janakiram points specifically to the following limitations:

• Persistent Services Limitation:
  By default, the database and other persistence-dependent services are confined to the ephemeral storage or instance storage of the EC2 instance. This is a very risky proposition as the data will be lost completely in the case of an instance failure. I wouldn’t be comfortable even running a non-mission-critical application like a WordPress blog on EC2 without attaching an EBS volume.
• Not Designed for Real Production:
  Launching a LAMP or Tomcat stack with 1-Click is great for a small proof-of-concept or a demo, but no one would attempt this for a production application. Moving to the Cloud is not just about forklifting an app from on-premise server or a host to a VM. It is definitely much more than that! AWS Marketplace squarely focuses just on compute by launching an EC2 instance with pre-configured stack without considering any of the essential building block services like storage, networking and databases.
• Loadbalancer Limitations:
  For example, the Amazon EC2 instances launched through the Marketplace cannot be added to an Elastic Loadbalancer. I attempted to launch 2 instances of the free Tomcat 6.0/MySQL Stack provided by OpenLogic and adding them to an Elastic Loadbalancer. ELB threw an error and refused to add the instances. This is a huge limitation for any real-world web application that intends to run on a Tomcat instance launched via the Marketplace. I wouldn’t be comfortable running my web application in just one instance without any possibility of scaling out in the future.

The Limitations of the VM-Centric Approach

Cloud applications are often packaged and run on VMs. It seems only natural that if applications are packaged on VMs, a marketplace would be a repository of pre-packed VMs, as in the case of the AWS marketplace.
Having said that, there are some basic flaws in this assumption – cloud applications and services are much more complex. Many of the services and applications need to run on high-availability mode, which often means that they need to run in more than one availability zone with inter-connectivity between them. In addition, many of the services, such as database services or web-services, need to run in a cluster deployment. In order to do so, multiple instances of VMs must be deployed. As real life applications tend to be multi-tier, there needs to be a way to deploy a set of VMs with some level of interdependency between them. When running an application on the cloud, we often need to think of it as a living organism that continues to change and evolve, rather than one-off deployment.
All these factors make the VM-centric approach a good trial and demo tool, but as Jankiram pointed out, a significant over-simplification of what cloud applications tend to be.

AWS Marketplace – Not a Fair Play

In order for a marketplace to be successful, it is essential that all players will get a fair shot to win consumers.
A marketplace owner in this context needs to take the role of “honest broker.”
Amazon offers a long list of its own set of services as products outside the marketplace that don’t face the limitations I listed above, in contrast to the applications that do run on the marketplace and are met with these challenges. This gives Amazon an unfair advantage over its own partners.

 

Building an Open Marketplace on OpenStack

The creation of an open marketplace would serve as an alternative to that of Amazon. A good substrate for that alternative approach would be to use open cloud frameworks like OpenStack. OpenStack already has a growing community of users and a growing support of cloud providers which provide an excellent starting point for the marketplace.
Below are some of the principles that I believe should serve as a foundation for building an open marketplace.

A Recipe-Based Marketplace

While the basic unit of deployment in many clouds tends to be based on VMs in many real deployments, the VM is used mostly as a generic container of the operating-system. The actual application services are deployed through a DevOps automation tool such as Chef, Puppet or Cloud Formation (Heat is the OpenStack alternative for CloudFormation on OpenStack) after the VM has been created. In this way, the deployment unit is the recipe rather than the VM. The recipe is used to describe the application services that will be deployed into the VM after it has been created. Unlike a VM, a recipe can be extended beyond the boundary of a VM and can describe fairly complex, multi-tier, clustered applications. It can also deal with the automation of post-deployment processes such as upgrades, monitoring, fail-over etc.
Based on that description, it only makes sense that we will use recipes as the unit of deployment instead of VMs. In this way, we can overcome many of the AWS marketplace limitations that are outlined above. As there is no standard recipe model as of yet, we’ll need to be able to integrate with existing recipes such as Chef, Puppet and CloudFormation.

Other Considerations

Having a recipe-based marketplace is a good starting point. However, there is much more to building a marketplace than to choosing the recipe-based engine upon which to run an application. The main challenge is around the user experience and mastering the balancing act of keeping the marketplace attractive for both the consumers and suppliers.
Below are some of the key principles that I believe should be taken into consideration when building an open marketplace:

• Open source – An open source marketplace would enable different cloud providers to offer and share similar applications and services across different cloud providers.


• Popular frameworks – The marketplace should be based on popular open frameworks such as Chef, Puppet or CloudFormation/Heat templates.


• Reduce the barrier to entry – Make the investment of porting the application to the marketplace worth the effort beyond the marketplace. To reduce the barrier of porting applications into the marketplace we need to design it in such a way that we could use the same elements for deploying our application outside the marketplace.


• Support both multi-tier and cluster deployments


• Extensible – Users can pick a service from the marketplace and easily customize it to their needs.


• Fair play – Applications that are running through the marketplace should have the exact same capabilities as any application that is running outside of the marketplace.

If You Build It, They Will Come – Doesn’t Work

These days I’m seeing many cloud providers trying to mimic Amazon’s success and launch their own marketplace. As in the case of Amazon, they also start with a VM-centric approach and thus, inherit many of its limitations. Furthermore, the main problem that I see with many of those attempts is that they seem to be taking the “if you build it, they will come” approach, not realizing that they don’t have the advantage of being first and, more importantly, are not at the same point where Amazon was when it launched its marketplace ( i.e. with a huge consumer-base running on their platform).
As a result, I personally believe that many of those attempts are doomed to fail.
The real opportunity IMHO is to take a more open approach that could work outside the boundaries of a specific cloud provider. OpenStack could serve as a great starting point for forming this ecosystem.
To illustrate the points from this post on what an Open Marketplace could look like, in the next post I’ll refer to how we use Cloudify as an open source framework for building your own cloud application marketplace on OpenStack.