My 5 Enterprise Cloud Predictions for 2013

imageI believe that this is the year when the enterprise will find its way to the cloud.
The mega Internet sites and applications are the new era enterprises. These will become the role models for the traditional enterprise. IT needs remain the same with regards to scale, security, SLA, etc. However, the traditional enterprise CIO has already set the goal for next year: 100% efficiency.
The traditional CIO understands that in order to achieve that goal, IT will need to start and do cloud, make sure that IT resources are utilized right, and that his teams move fast.

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Cloud Capacity Part 2: Plan Your Consumption

Cloud CapacityIn the first part I presented some basic concepts and an overview of cloud capacity management. cloud capacity discussion has two main aspects:

  1. Infrastructure capacity management by the IaaS vendor to plan capacity of the cloud data-center to optimize utilization and decrease operations costs.
  2. Cloud resources consumption by the cloud consumers  (any IT organization such as a SaaS vendor) including planning capacity demand in order to achieve efficient consumption of the purchased cloud resources. In this part I will discuss this aspect.

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The IaaS Management Market: Evolution, Vendors and More

A lot has already been said about the false cloud use where the IaaS platform utilized as an hosting extension of the IT organization’s data center and not taking advantage of the elasticity benefits to generate a cost effective and scalable IT operation. Using the public IaaS whether it is Amazon, Rackspace or any other vendor means using a highly dynamic environment which presents an increasing complexity hence loss of control. Checking the list below I can say that cloud (including all its layers IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) control basically contains the same aspects as the good old system management.

What is “System management” ?
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Hybrid Cloudonomics – Part 2


The first part of Weinman’s lecture discussing the basic “go to the cloud” and demonstrating cloud environments’ loads of different corporations’ web applications. In this part we will bring 6 scenarios presented by Weinman, each includes a brief analysis and proof of its cost and benefits.

First lets start with several assumptions and definitions:
> > > 5 Basic assumptions Pay-per-use capacity model:

  1. Paid on use – Paid for when used and not paid for when not used.
  2. No depend on time – The cost for such capacity is fixed. It does not depend on the time or use of the request.
  3. Fixed unit cost – The unit cost for on-demand or dedicated capacity does not depend on the quantity of resources requested (you don’t get discount for renting 100 rooms for the same time).
  4. No other costs – There are no additional relevant costs needed for the analysis.
  5. No delay – All demand served without any delay.

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Scale IT and Make Your Cloud Capacity Meets Demand

Capacity vs demandThe practice of shaping demand to fit the available resources can be found for example in transportation businesses, where airlines charges more for their service when demand is high and charge less to encourage more demand. In the real-time and interactive on-line world,  the challenge is to ensure that capacity meets demand.
The following diagram shows 3 cases of over capacity, under capacity and on demand capacity, which the latter can be achieved only by taking an advantage of the cloud elasticity.
IT systems or applications have capacity limitations. Sometimes a new SaaS web application works well in its first phase on the air as it serves from tens up to a maximum of several hundreds of users. In this stage, there will be no need to worry about a scalable hosting environment and paying a flat fee for the fixed computing resources makes sense. Over time as the SaaS product matures, the amount of users increases and the overall usage goes up. The SaaS vendor will have to deal with these scalability challenges and hopefully without the service suffering from poor performance. So what are the options to maintain the application’s availability with the new demands? Or in other word how do we scale it?
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6 Key Essentials for Hybrid Cloudonomics: a Lecture by Joe Weinman

Joe Weinman is well known in the cloud computing community as the founder of Cloudonomics. Presenting complex simulation tools, Weinman characterizes the sometimes counterintuitive business, financial, and user experience benefits of cloud computing including its on-demand, pay-per-use and other buisness aspects. Last month I had the pleasure of participating in Weinman’s webinar. Weinman discussed several interesting points which I would like to share with you.

Weinman started by contradicting what seem to be the fundamental assumptions regarding the Cloud and its benefits. There was nothing radical about what I heard but it made me think and challenge all the things I took for granted –
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