[updated 4.22.2009 6:28 pm, had an extraneous "a" in "Boothby", apologies to Rod.]
Session Abstract: “It used to be that you could see the business, touch the bricks, sample the product and the biggest problem with holding a meeting was finding a free boardroom. The first decade of the 21st century has been about enterprises dissipating, virtualizing and breaking into widely spread parts. As the enterprise fragmented geographically (even into the home) the first parts of traditional operations that vanished were the face-to-face meetings and the printed, hand delivered memos. The tools that supported this first step mainly dealt with the small, seemingly unimportant parts of an enterprise’s operations that nobody really noticed going away. As we move to the next decade, the big things are disappearing. A data-center is not a rounding error in a budget -- it can now be removed from the balance sheet entirely. Cloud IT infrastructure now can take on many forms - internal clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds. Companies like Joyent are enabling this second was wave of enterprise virtualization and making all three cloud scenarios a reality! Over the next ?? minutes we will explain what is making this flexibility possible and how you can leverage this evolution to gain agility, flexibility and capability in an open, loving cloud.”
Rod Boothby is VP of Business Development for Joyent. Joyent has a public cloud offering, joyent.com as well as software (cloud control) for organizations to manage private clouds.
This afternoon, I attended Rod Boothby’s session. True to his session abstract, Rod opened by discussing how business has changed over time from large organizations that owned and managed every aspect of a customer value chain (manufacturing to customer delivery) to ecosystems, retaining control over core value chain activities, and contracting out non-core activities, such as shipping and package delivery to trusted providers.
From here, Rod spoke of organizations applying the same principles to information technology resources and solutions. CIOs are looking at their portfolios, budgets and backlogs and are making investment and deployment (on-premise, private cloud, public cloud) decisions that factor in cost, risk and time. Projects that are non-core, or even experimental, are being implemented in the public cloud. Core projects that can benefit from cloud resource utilization and automation, such as retail websites, are being implemented in private clouds.
Joyent’s business is Infrastructure-as-a-Service, so that was the focus of Rod’s talk. During the talk, Rod shared some customer examples – Gilt, LinkedIn, walked through getting started with Joyent’s cloud, and showed the administration tool. In lieu of recapping the entire talk, I wanted to highlight a few points that are important for enterprises to consider.
First, scaling. Because cloud computing offers “scale on demand” or “elasticity” people sometimes mistake that for “and then magic happens”. Certainly, in a PaaS environment like Google App Engine, auto-scaling is built-in. But, the tradeoff is portability. You can’t just deploy an existing application to AppEngine, you need to re-write it. As well, you can’t just export an AppEngine application to another environment, you need to re-write it.
In a IaaS environment, you have code portability, but you need to do the work for scaling. Not at the physical layer, but you do need to think through your scaling concerns and configure your application components / tiers correctly. From Rod’s slide, these scaling concerns are:
- Traffic Management
- Caching
- Silos
--- WWW –> Horizontal
--- statics –> Nginx + Horizontal
--- admin
- Caching –> memecached
- Read / Write Traffic Management
- DB Clustering
Next, Security. Rod points out that Security is not single point of concern, nor is there a single solution. Security concerns:
- Network
- Storage
- OS / Virtualization
- Application
- Physical (Hardware)
- Interface
Similar to Michael Berman of Catbird, Rod points out that security is a joint responsibility between the cloud operator (provider) and cloud application developer (consumer). The cloud application developer needs to protect sensitive data (encryption) and provide appropriate application level security. Essentially, similar concerns and precautions to in-house hosted solutions.
On the OS / Virtualization point, Rod pointed out that Joyent doesn’t use virtualization, uses compartmentalization based on Solaris; this prevents security issues from co-located server tenants. For more rigorous requirements, Joyent offers dedicated servers.
Lastly, Rod spoke to cloud recovery. If something goes wrong with your virtual instance, will you need to simply reboot, or rebuild? Definitely a question that should be on any cloud computing checklist. Rod pointed out the Amazon EC2 alone, without Rightscale add-on, would require rebuild. Joyent, reboot.
When I was at the Cloud Computing Expo in NY, Rod gave me a briefing and live tour of Joyent. At the time, I noted the customer account total of 24,200.
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