Monitis: Cloud Monitoring Blog

If you’re a Chevy Chase fan, you know that, in the movie, National Lampoon’s Vacation, his wife’s cousin Eddie plays a bothersome, uncouth mooch – on the trashy side, too.

Well, I stumbled upon a blog post that talked about virtual machines as a problem for developers, not the answer, and that the real path to salvation will come when we murder OS and adopt fast, efficient platform-centric cloud computing. Here’s a classic quote from the post:

“VMs have certainly allowed us to (literally) think outside the box about how we characterize “workloads” and have enabled us to begin talking about how we make them somewhat mobile, portable, interoperable, easy to describe, inventory and in some cases more secure. Cool. There’s still a pile of crap inside ‘em. What do I mean? There’s a bloated, parasitic resource-gobbling cancer inside every VM.  For the most part, it’s the real reason we even have mass market virtualization today. It’s called the operating system.

“If we didn’t have resource-inefficient operating systems, handicapped applications that were incestuously hooked to them, and tons of legacy networking stuff to deal with that unholy affinity, imagine the fun we could have.  Imagine how agile and flexible we could become.”

The author is saying that virtualization is just a band aid because the real answer is to get rid of greed, moochy, resource-hungry operating systems and embrace the PaaS world, for instance the platform-oriented cloud.

He goes onto say that Cloud v1.0 “with all it’s froth and hype” will pale in comparison to Cloud 2.0 — “the revenge of SOA, web services, BPM, enterprise architecture and the developer. “ He warns, though: “… the protocols and models for how applications interact with the network are sure going to change and accelerate due to Cloud — at least they should.”

Looks like infrastructure folks will need to stay on top of things as we say goodbye to OS, virtual machines and hello to the cloud, or cloud2.0!

The world is sure spinning fast these days. Breathe!

The cloud is becoming more of a reality by the minute, as prestigious companies line up to become part of the future. The latest is Professional services specialist Deloitte. I read that their Australian division is investing some $10 million to transition to a single data center (down from two), and at the same time, starting its journey toward developing a cloud platform for internal use and for customers, too.

Deloitte is already heavily virtualized, at 40% of servers, and after the transition to a single center, that number should reach 60%. In the story, a company spokesman said: “Our longer term target is for just about everything to be virtualized.”

Also, more interestingly, Deloitte plans on building an internal on-demand cloud to support both internal and client needs.  Deloitte’s construction will also involve creating a high-speed (10 GBit) dark fiber connection between Sydney and Melbourne, where the bulk of Deloitte’s staff are based.

Driving much of Deloitte’s infrastructure construction is the growing need to store and manage data for clients.  Growth in demand for electronic discovery and data analytics services has led to a 400% growth in storage capacity at the firm – “with a couple of hundred terabytes of data being held online,” the spokesman said.

Dramatizing this situation, the article said Deloitte has one client with 20,000 back-up tapes – “and they need a provider able to reconstitute, de-duplicate and access this information.”

It’s always exciting to me to read about companies finally recognizing that they need to switch from old-fashioned multiple server set ups and embrace virtualization and cloud computing.  I think it’s great that Deloitte is making its moves, and smart of them, too, to recognize the giant wave that’s building for third-party data management among corporations.

I read an interesting article that quoted a government official on how much U.S. taxpayers will save by the government’s migration to the cloud. In it, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, was quoted as saying:

"We’ve been building data center after data center, acquiring application after application, and frankly, what’s that done is it’s driven the cost and investments in technology across the board. ”We cannot continue in this trajectory." He said that the government spends $19 billion out of a $76 billion federal information technology budget on infrastructure, and much of that is duplicative.

Cloud computing, putting commonly used software into a shared set of servers and letting agencies buy and use only what they need, will bring down costs drastically. The U.S. has already created Apps.gov  – which frees the government from building and maintaining software and infrastructure and enables it to buy technology from third parties.

One example of cloud computing success in the government sector is USA.gov, a listing of government information and jobs. It cost about $2.5 million yearly to maintain, but, In May, the U.S. moved it to the cloud, and taxpayers now foot a maintenance bill for $800,000 per year.

It’s very encouraging to see numbers like this, and I hope that different government agencies continue to move their databases and apps on the cloud. The U.S. is not only making its operations more efficient, but they’re saving us money, too.