Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Management and Cloud Migration

So, you've been tasked with analyzing the systems you have and migrating them to the Cloud. Sounds like a bit of a challenge. In part, you know there are some systems that will take longer to get to the Cloud than others. After all, you have systems like databases, ERP applications, and even Enterprise, Fault, and Performance systems that are critical to your operation. In many cases, email and DNS are very critical to your IT service. A lot of decisions, some harder than others.

Step Back

 All too often you find some Manager head over heels trying to push everything to the Cloud right up front. They've been to a couple of seminars and lurked on a few webcasts. It is so easy to just make a decision and hope for the best thinking it must be better in the cloud because everyone else is doing it.

Even if you deploy your own virtualized environment, call it your private cloud, and start migrating things over wantonly, you are headed for more pitfalls than you think. From a Management perspective, there are differences in legacy management applications and techniques and more "service oriented" approaches. Both have their form and function but migrating to cloud without considering the ramifications of management coverage could leave you exposed and vulnerable. (Translated as CLMs - Career Limiting Moves!)

What does Cloud Give you?

Mobility.

 First and foremost, it gives you the ability to move. Over the course of years, your process to put in place new computing assets has been increased and made more complex as it evolved. First, its the engineering process. Then the acquisition process. Then Development and prototyping. then migration into production. Each and every process along the way has put inplace more and more controls, check points, decision validations, and scheduling all to get something into production and working for a customer.

 If the IT department can't respond in short intervals, then why not hire a consultant to stand up a Web infrastructure in the cloud, upload our content, and take it down a month later when the need is diminished? In fact, you see alot of this in that the business needs Web assets for specific time periods and within a short time period and IT cannot even deliver a design in the time that the business unit needs the capability. A lot of business units will circumvent the IT department to make something happen. Only problem - When it breaks,who do they call?

 Being able to streamline your processes that enable new services to be delivered quickly, is a key benefit of cloud. You reserve your longer, legacy processes to developing the infrastructure and lining up the external cloud service contracts.

Standardization

Because the unit of deployment can be whatever you decide, you must work to develop standard packages that can be pre-packaged, tested, and validated ahead of time. This saves countless hours in engineering as the engineering is done once and replicated. Additionally, patch management becomes more effective as you test against standard packages.

Standardization also enables you as an IT Service provider, to provide a comprehensive catalog that business owners can use to satisfy their needs. Along with this, you can begin to standardize support costs more effectively. Once you standardize the platforms and applications, you can begin to really standardize your processes.

Think about your processes around monitoring and management and around support, care and feeding. Can you really start down the road of true ITIL Incident Management where corrective actions are defined?

Kill the Deadwood!

 Do you have elements / Silos in your environment that just get in the way of progress? Come on now, everyone does. Sometimes products / integrations just grow obsolete.

 Sometimes a product becomes in grained but the ability to support it or replace it is gone. At that point, people are afraid to touch it. It has become a boil on the rear of IT at that point. Nasty. Noone will touch it. And it festers on.

 Sometimes this happens because a person or group becomes the champion of the element and when you need something that the legacy product doesn't do, it means work. Theres an ongoing fallacy that in house developed products are free. Nothing is free. Someone has to continue development. Someone has to support it. Someone has to document it. Someone has to train others on it.

 Sometimes,an organization is just adverse to change. This is much more prevalent than one might think. There are folks that just don't do well with shifting sands. They prefer the status quo as it is more comfortable to avoid change. 

Changing to Cloud and Virtualization changes the way you monitor and manage things. Instead of managing by IP address or a node, you must start with the service first. In contrast, a vMotion event can move your node to a completely different location, hardware, and even disk. And it happens very quickly.

The legacy monitoring apps you've been used to may not be able to function effectively going forward. You must be willing to analyze and be real about the legacy products or you're going to get stuck with something that becomes a ball and chain. Even if the product you have is free, a part of an ELA that doesn't cost anything, or you are living on maintenance only, if the product does not fit, you are wasting TIME AND MONEY.

Analyze and Define Your Needs

Requirements is where you start and where you validate.  If the solutions you put in place do not address the requirements, you need to analyze the risk of non-coverage and work through solutions. Wares vendors love to see valid requirements.  They get an opportunity to address the things they do on a point by point basis.

Because you are dealing with moving technology, keep the requirements open such that if a Wares vendor has additional capability that your requirements do not address, do not throw away these capabilities in your evaluations.   Be extremely wary of vendors who want to minimize your requirements. It is often a sign of a lack of capability and a lack of the ability to effectively compete in their functional area.

Be open to new things.  If you are deploying VDI capabilities, look at VDI Management solutions.   Some of these technologies are new enough that deployment without specialized management capabilities can leave to naked using legacy management technology. Consider this - SNMP support is waning in VMWare ESXi and they prefer you access their capabilities via their Web Services API.

Organize your Data Model

Going forward, you need to look at your sources of truth - albeit configuration, performance, situational, and workflow data elements, need to be aligned and understood as a data model. What you do not want to end up with is multiple sources of the same data modeled in different ways, and not correlated. This will become painfully aware when you start organizing a service catalog. How confusing would it be in your catalog to have an entry as Server - Redhat + MySQL + PHP + Apache and an adjacent entry that is LAMP + MySQL. Think about the differences in CPU Cores.

Validate your Security Posture

Work diligently to identify and understand the risks of your systems, applications, and data as things migrate to a cloud or virtualized model. Consider where your data is, what its importance is, and what accesses you have to it. Moving to the Cloud or Virtualization may mean your data may move to a SAN.

Network access protection changes a bit in Cloud. One may be limited in what can be done to protect access. And with vMotion this becomes even more complex.

Integration

Use the move to Cloud and Virtualization to stress integration. You have requirements that may be addressed by multiple solutions. However, one must work to make things seamless. Because of the speed of deployment and deactivation, you need to work through how information and integration should work across products and data elements.

 When a service is provisioned, what happens next? Does it get put in your Service Desk solution? Is monitoring activated? Is billing activated? Customer notified? Work through defining and addressing the workflow and integration up front. Even if you setup a basic process, you can work to make it more efficient over time.

Cleanup your Applications

Many applications you have may run inconsistently in constrained environments. What happens when you introduce latency into your application? What about running on constrained hardware? (1 CPU core a 1GB memory when the Java JVM takes 1.1GB of memory itself). Some applications are terrible communicators across the network but network technology hides it. For example,open a Word document on a network share and watch it with a protocol analyzer. Now hit the page down key in your document and watch what happens. It downloads the entire document again and fseeks to the next page!

Cloud and virtualized environments introduce new challenges. Combinations of applications may affect each other when presented on the same blade. Over subscription can wreak havoc if you put two dominant applications together.

Invest in some APM applications, a protocol analyzer and some data gathering and reporting tools. I like to use both Class Loader based APM systems as well as network traffic capture based APMs systems as you get to analyze applications from multiple aspects.

Summary

Moving to the Cloud and toward virtualization does not have to be scary. But neither should you approach it blindly. Identify and understand your requirements and work through ensuring that whatever you implement, you understand what you are getting, what the risks are related to security, data, and availability, and what its going to take to implement and support.

Moving to the Cloud is also an opportunity to clean up your legacy systems, applications, processes, and organization. Get rid of the functions that don't work. Work to eliminate all of the red tape, OSI Layer 8 infrastructures, and inefficiencies that have been dragging down your IT Departments ability to provide good service.  If you migrate broken functions to the cloud, these will continue to break things, only much faster.

1 comment:

  1. "Kill the Deadwood!!'
    I might have found a new sig for my e-mail

    ReplyDelete