Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

As the computing traveled from virtual age to Cloud Computing, the work of auditors has gotten tougher. With physical location becoming irrelevant in Cloud Computing, it has become tougher to define control and ownership of data for the auditors.

Previously control was determined by ownership, which meant physical asset like computer hardware. With virtualization physical asset became irrelevant and Cloud Computing broke the link between ownership and control completely since location and application became independent of each other.

We are rapidly moving from location centric model to identity-and-data centric model. In former model the location, ownership and control where bound within physical parameters. The latter made physical boundary irrelevant, therefore links between the three elements requires revision.

Control does not require total ownership or fixed location. With a private key the control of information can be exerted from anywhere without having rest of infrastructure. In Cloud Computing, the control can be exerted through combination of encryption, contracts and imposition of minimum security levels. Cloud computing environment can be made secure, compliant and trusted with these measures in place. The auditors can adapt to the new technology with clearer definition and links between control, location and ownership of data.

The U.S government has taken a major step in Cloud Computing by launching Federal Cloud Store Apps.Gov. Article in Ulitzer highlights Cloud services available on the store that includes Business applications, Cloud IT Services and Social Media applications.

Majority applications are from Salesforce.com and Google while IBM, Microsoft and Amazon resulted in no results. The Social Media section has well known names such as Facebook and Flickr while document sharing websites Slideshare.com and Scribd are also part of the list. The Cloud IT Services section will be functional soon with the following categories in infrastructure services:

• Cloud Storage
• Software Development
• Virtual Machines
• Web Hosting

More services will be added to the store in due time. The billing method is available in both monthly and hourly rates depending upon use. The services are offered under GSA Multiple Award Schedule and ordering activities will use procedures in Federal Acquisition Regulation. The website does not have feature to add services to the list which makes it look like Google/Salesforce store, the sooner it broadens for others the better.

This is a revolutionary move by the government and the providers of Cloud Computing Applications will have new opportunities to approach government as a buyer. The news business models will become more attractive and large enterprises will see the benefits of adopting them. This will allow them to change their mindset and accelerate the adaption process to integrate the new systems to their corporate environment.

Since the creation of Salesforce.com a decade ago, Marc Benioff has been predicting death of software as a product. InformationWeek 500 article discusses the life of Salesforce.com in Cloud Computing that started a few years ago and now the company not just preaching but also living it. The VP of Enterprise Strategy, CIO during the migration phase to Cloud Computing, says the company does not need database administrators or patch experts; instead the business process experts do the same work easily depending upon the business function. The softwares are already hosted on Force.com platform where customers, companies and independent developers built applications using programming languages and custom interface framework and without technical knowledge.

The company began migration in 2006 and discarded on-premise applications to move to application services on Force.com. The company is still not fully on Cloud Computing due to Oracle financials that form backbone to company’s financial setup. The company has worked on transparency and reliability issues by providing complete details to disruptions and outages customers faced on their website. The company still maintains uptime of 99.997% which is very good as per industry standard.

Salesforce.com has adopted Agile software development method that allows even non-technical people to develop applications. Since basic code is already running on the website, they can write small and limited functionality applications for their own. The company has formed Scrum teams that have both IT and business professionals who develop applications faster and deploy quicker than regular application development and that is accomplished with minimum input from IT. There’s no need to hire experts of Java, .NET and Database Administration since one works at application layer and beneath that everything is already taken care off.

Many companies have shifted their entire departmental functions to Salesforce.com and designed custom applications without involving their IT department; the need to extensively test customized software is no longer required. Salesforce.com has over $1 Billion in annual revenues with many big names as its clients and although it hasn’t killed software industry, it has set a high standard for Cloud Computing.

Number one on the list of technologies in "Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycle Special Report" is cloud computing. The report goes so far as to call the ‘cloud’ buildup deafening. Most of the noise swirling around cloud computing is coming from technology vendors presenting their own special approach to the cloud, according to the Gartner report. Phrases like ‘economy of scale’

The government should move more IT applications to a cloud computing platform, according to the recently released Digital Britain report. Chapter eight of the report, which addresses procurement, suggests that cloud computing (delegating responsibility for technical IT management) could be an appropriate platform for shared IT services in the public sector.

Cloud Computing can give on-demand service and provide organizations with lots of elasticity in their demands for and their spending on the area of IT. The report puts forth the generation of a ‘G Cloud’ intended for government business apps to go along with the Public Service Network. It also claims that this might be used for functions like storage and server virtualization and for systems-management automation as well.

Gartner Blog Network member Andrea DiMaio suggests that the use of open source could be reduced by increased reliance on cloud computing, at least within the government vertical. Andrea points out that although open source and cloud computing are obviously linked, cloud computing is politically popular (as well as the object of considerable hype), and this is distracting attention from the open source movement. Further, she observes, interest in both cloud computing and open source is driven primarily by the potential for reduced costs.

In effect, some of the biggest reasons to go open source, such as cost concerns and independence from vendors (though you still need to use a vendor in some cases,) are drying up.The cloud-based solution will turn out to be not only cheaper, but more flexible in its options, so people are turning to these cloud-based solutions to solve the same problems that open sourcing has in the past, like reducing dependency on Microsoft products and saving on licensing costs.

 The Eucalyptus Systems which is the creator of eponymous open source private cloud platform has commercially launched it’s first product. They have named it Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE) and it will make it’s users to apply an on-premise cloud viewing by the use of VMware’s virtualization widgetry. It will also include vSphere,ESX and ESXi. For the customers using vSphere EEE is the only solution of computing private cloud and it is said by the Eucalyptus. Other hypervisors such as KVM ans Xen are also supported by EEE.

The data centers that power cloud computing services should be managed more as a simple computing entity and less as a group of discrete servers in order to support the increased use of online information storage and access, according to a recently-released Google white paper. With cloud computing functionality, the physical platform resembles a computing warehouse more than the traditional pizza box or refrigerator form factor. This is significantly different from older hosting facilities, and a modern large datacenter cannot simply be understood simply as a set of co-located servers.

In order to efficiently maintain high levels of Internet performance, a substantial subset of the hardware and software in a hosting facility must work together. This can only be accomplished through a holistic approach to the data center design and deployment. In fact, a Google white paper suggested regarding the data center as a single, massive warehouse-scale computer (WSC), where the Internet service is a program which may consist of multiple specialized programs that interact to provide complex end-user services such as email, search engines, or maps. Each of these specialized programs could be implemented and supported by a different engineering team, which need not be limited by organizational, geographic, or corporate boundaries.

Xen.org, which is home to the open source Xen hypervisor (a hypervisor, also called virtual machine monitor (VMM), is a computer software/hardware platform virtualization software that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently), announced the XCP, or Xen Cloud Platform, initiative: a strong new effort that is community-led and builds on the improving leadership in today’s cloud of the Xen hypervisor, and gives a proven, secure open source infrastructure platform intended for tomorrow’s federated cloud services. 

The CLOUD XEN is going to speed up use of cloud infrastructure for enterprise clients by giving them open source, virtual infrastructure tech which will make it easy for the service providers to give customizable, secure, multi-tenant cloud service which will work effortlessly with virtualized application workloads that the clients are running already in private clouds and in internal datacenters, but without locking these clients into any vendor in particular.

The Xen Cloud Platform addresses cloud providers’ needs by blending multi-tenancy and isolation abilities of a Xen hypervisor along with improved storage, security, and network virtualization products to give users a nice set of virtual infrastructure cloud offerings. This platform also handles users’ demands for availability, security, isolation, and performance for both public and private clouds. This project won’t try to create new or independent orchestration or management offerings since it’s an area that has existing good offerings as well as active and continuing community development, featuring open source options from OpenNebula.org and Eucalyptus Project along with solutions coming from cloud providers and commercial virtualization vendors too.

 This week Gmail, an e-mail service provided by Google, went down for several hours and initiated numerous concerns for its users. It created a myriad of editorials and subsequent commentary, all declaring the sky was falling. Perhaps, the concern is high because the reliability of Gmail is really HIGHER when compare to our corporate e-mail which tend be down comparatively often. In cloud computing, diagnosing & resolving the issue is neither easy nor under our control unlike when we have our local servers in our own data center. Hence when things go wrong in cloud computing, there is nothing we can do but to wait