Cloud Tools, enterprise it ready?

Service providers, start-ups, integrators, and veteran vendors provide a wealth of management tools. But companies may not be prepared to use complex choreography and automation systems.

Industry analysts and cloud integration experts say there are no restrictions on the data and types of tools that help enterprise it fully adapt to the cloud. At present, users have many tools to choose from, some tools can assist IT department for virtual machine configuration management, some tools can help enterprises to migrate local business applications to the cloud, some tools can help to orchestrate cloud services, and provide monitoring services across multiple clouds. In addition, users can select many other tools, some of which can deploy management policy tools on the cloud, some can set control parameters, and some can encrypt management of the data that flows through.

The tools provided by cloud platform providers, system integrators, third party start-ups, and established companies are roughly equal in number. In other words, one of the factors inhibiting the growth of these tools is the maturity of the enterprise's cloud consumption to make the most of the tools.

"In many of these tools, technology is virtually fine, and they are fully mature enough to be used in the enterprise," said Laurent Lachal, senior analyst at the IT consulting firm Ovum. The problem is largely whether companies working on the cloud are ready to use them. ”

Many of the corporate customers he has contacted have spent the past two years focusing not only on whether the public cloud is appropriate for their operations, but also on virtualization in their own data centers, said Mike Pearl, partner and cloud computing director at PwC. At present, most PwC customers are committed to deploying automated provisioning services, as this is necessary to achieve the economies of scale promised by cloud computing.

"The next step for these it stores is to identify which tools will maximize the ability to simplify the automatic transfer cloud service to customers as a single click," Pearl said. Cross-platform management, metering, visual dashboards for cloud assets, and tools to provide self-healing services are undoubtedly useful to users at some point. But for most users, many are still a future proposition. ”

Keep it simple

"When we deploy these tiered tools to the top of the cloud services we use, we try to keep them as concise as possible," said Craig Miller, CTO of Empire Avenue. "The company is a social virtual securities trading market headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Empire Avenue created an interesting virtual securities market where each registered user could create a stock of their own. The stock price evaluation is based on your social network influence to decide. The site will measure your influence in the social network based on how active you are on the Empire Avenue and on other mainstream social platforms, as well as the number of fans, and ultimately determine the value of your stock.

Empire Avenue uses hybrid mode to run both dedicated servers and multi-tenant virtual servers on the Rackspace cloud, which support the company's Web sites, deployment environments, file servers, and databases. The company also uses Amazon's cloud storage service. Miller and his team were very pleased with the tools Rackspace provided. Teams usually write their own configuration scripts on virtual machines when they need to.

"Third-party tools add to the complexity of the work, and we are not interested in it at the moment," Miller said. He also pointed out that the tools that went into the virtual machine cycle would dramatically increase the cost of running on the cloud. "It is one of the biggest benefits of running on the cloud that you don't have to pay for what you need to do to keep a tight grip on resource usage." "he said.

All large cloud platform providers are creating or buying cloud management tools to provide customers who wish to use these tools. For example, Rackspace has introduced a GUI based tool called Cloud Control Panel that allows users to add custom tags to their cloud assets, set up filters to help find shared common assets, and perform multiple management tasks more easily on the same screen.

The Amazon AWS Management Console provides a point-and-click Management interface through which users can manage and monitor instances running across multiple cloud solutions. Amazon has also launched a mobile application for Android, which supports some of the management features of the AWS Management Console.

"Enterprise It wants the type of cloud management tools to be the same as the tools they are used to manage servers in the datacenter," says Doug Jarvis, product marketing manager SuSE Cloud, a private cloud solution provider based on OpenStack open source cloud platform. The key to the SuSE Cloud Management tool Suite is the SuSE Cloud Management Server, which provides customers with more than 700 configuration and provisioning options for control, computing, and storage nodes for SuSE cloud. Jarvis the functionality of the tool suite as an enterprise's YaST feature, which provides a reliable program for deploying and managing Linux-based Server software. "Configuration is a key step in making cloud deployment possible." "Jarvis said.

Rackspace's CTO, John Engates, says Rackspace will continue to improve their management tools, allowing cloud users to personally control their cloud assets. He also encouraged partners who entered the OpenStack project to do the same. However, he believes that enterprise it should also focus on the automation of tools supply and management functions. Rackspace launched the Cloud Automation tool Opencenter in March 2013 and expects it to play a major role in the enterprise private cloud solution.

John Treadway, senior vice president of Cloud Marvell Company, believes there is confusion between cloud automation tools and cloud orchestration tools because they are often confused. Automation is the writing of programs for repetitive tasks, and choreography is the integration of different automated programs to handle workflows and provide some integrity across the data streams of these programs. Treadway says automation is often the domain of cloud providers and is beginning to become part of most IaaS stacks.

Treadway points out that OpenStack is implementing multiple projects that can increase automation services for cloud service providers running OpenStack services. He added that VMware has launched a variety of powerful automation tools for users of the platform.

IBM, HP, CA technologies and other traditional systems management vendors have launched their own cloud automation tools. However, Treadway stressed that the tools of these vendors are often very complex and fragile and may only be used by IT departments that have established long-term partnerships with these vendors (and have signed advisory services agreements).

Third-party Cloud management tools, introduced by vendors such as Rightscale, Appistry, Dynamicops, and Tap-in Bae, also provide tools to promote automated programs. In addition, these vendors have also introduced a number of tools to measure usage, cross-platform performance monitoring, and cost tracking.

Automation and choreography

"Automation will eventually become inevitable," said Paul Burns, president and cloud analyst at Neovise. Over time, the problems encountered in the cloud will disappear and IT departments must not worry too much about it. "Burns and 451 Group analyst Carl Lehmann all agree that choreography is a bigger problem to solve."

"The choreography question involves how you can incorporate the cloud into your overall computing architecture and how to integrate them correctly with what you already have," Lehmann said. The cloud choreography problem occurs at two levels. You have to apply to the integration of applications, as well as business to business integration. The former is easier to solve because of less security concerns. ”

At present, traditional middleware vendors such as Oracle and IBM, as well as cloud vendors such as Dellboomi, Informatica, Jitterbit and Mulesoft, have launched their own cloud choreography products.

Center Point Energy is a Fortune 500 company that provides power and gas services for Arkansas State, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi State, Oklahoma and Texas State. According to Barry Glasco, the company's salesforce.com theme, Center Point Energy uses the Mulesoft Cloudhub integrated Platform as a service (Ipaas), The platform allows businesses to gather all the data from a large number of utility companies to run their www.mytruecost.com Web sites. "We have to interact with the regulated and unregulated sources in this industry, and thousands of calls are made daily for data sources and our salesforce.com platforms," Glasco said. We must constantly integrate these actions. ”

The biggest challenge for users is to make sure that the data that is used between local and cloud assets is clean, orderly, and can be used reliably. Lehmann said: "This involves the whole cloud governance (cloud governance) problem." Ideally, cloud governance can help us understand what is happening between applications, between cloud services, and between business units. "Cloud governance" refers to the elaboration of detailed policies or regulations for the use of cloud services in an organization, in order to ensure the security of applications and data when located at a remote location.

Lehmann that the development of cloud governance lags behind the development of data choreography in general, because there is no dedicated tool specifically for cloud governance. "However, you can see that the foundations of cloud governance are forming in some tools," he said. These tools enable tracking of authentication programs, access control, and key management in the cloud. ”

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)