Choosing how to build a cloud is the most strategic decision IT leaders will make this decade. It’s a choice that will determine your organization’s competitiveness, flexibility, and IT economics for the next ten years. Done right, a cloud delivers strategic advantages to the business by redirecting resources from lights-on to innovation. But only an open cloud delivers on the full strategic business value and promise of cloud computing. Not all “open” is created equal though. Openness doesn’t stop and end with the submission of some format to a standards body or with the announcement of partners endorsing some specific technology platform. And it’s more than just open source, important as open source is. In this newsletter, we’ll share with you our perspective about how you can build an open hybrid cloud to maximize the positive benefits for your business. And you’ll learn how Red Hat, as the open source leader, is uniquely positioned to help you realize those benefits.
Paul Cormier
Red Hat Executive Vice President & President, Products and Technologies
Welcome
2Why the future of cloud is open 4
From the Gartner Files: Design Your Private Cloud With Hybrid in Mind 8
About Red Hat
Why Should Your Cloud
Be Designed With Open
And Hybrid in Mind?
How an open, hybrid cloud architecture is critical to your cloud success
Issue 1
• Gives you the freedom to use IP. Recent history has repeatedly
shown that there are few guarantees when a company owns IP on which you depend. Even if using some piece of proprietary IP is, today, tacitly tolerated, there are no guarantees for tomorrow in the event of a change of ownership or financial situation. The only guarantee is to use technology that is free from any required or potentially required licenses or other restrictions. so-called “de facto standards,” which are often “standards” only insofar as they are promoted by a large vendor, often fail this test.
• Is deployable on the infrastructure of your choice. Hybrid cloud
management should provide an additional layer of abstraction above virtualization, physical servers, storage, networking, and public cloud providers. This implies – indeed requires – that cloud management not be tied to a specific virtualization and other foundational technology. This is a fundamental reason that cloud is different from virtualization management and is a fundamental enabler of hybrid clouds that span physical servers, multiple virtualization platforms, and a wide range of public cloud providers, including top public clouds.
• Is pluggable and extensible with an open API. This lets users add
features, providers, and technologies from a variety of vendors or other sources. Critically, the API itself cannot be under the control of a specific vendor or tied to a specific implementation, but must be under the auspices of a third-party organization that allows for contributions and extensions in an open and transparent manner. Deltacloud, an API that abstracts the differences between clouds, provides a good example. It is under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation and is neither a Red Hat-controlled project nor tied to a particular implementation of cloud management. • Enables portability to other clouds. Implicit in a cloud approach
that provides support for heterogeneous infrastructure is that investments made in developing for an open cloud must be portable to other such clouds. Portability takes a variety of forms, including programming languages and frameworks, data, and the applications themselves. If you develop an application for one cloud, you shouldn’t need to rewrite it in a different language or use different APIs to move it somewhere else. Furthermore, a consistent runtime environment across clouds ensures that retesting and re-qualification isn’t needed every time you want to redeploy. Done right, a cloud delivers strategic advantages to the business by
redirecting resources from lights-on to innovation. But only an open cloud delivers on the full strategic business value and promise of cloud computing.
But not all “open” is created equal. Openness doesn’t stop and end with the submission of some format to a standards body or with the announcement of partners endorsing some specific technology platform. Using open source technologies to build the cloud is (or should be) a given. It’s more than that.
An open cloud isn’t about having some singular feature or
characteristic. It’s about having a wide range of attributes that push the needle from wholly closed to truly open. Just because a cloud avoids being a walled garden in some respects doesn’t mean that it delivers the full business value of an open cloud.
An open cloud has the following key characteristics:
• Is open source. This allows adopters to control their particular
implementation and doesn’t restrict them to the technology and business roadmap of a specific vendor. It puts users in control of their own destiny and provides them with visibility into the technology on which they’re basing their business. Open source also lets them collaborate with other communities and companies to help drive innovation in the areas that are important to them.
• Has a viable, independent community. Open source isn’t just
about the code, its license, and how it can be used and extended. At least as important is the community associated with the code and how it’s governed. Realizing the collaborative potential of open source and the innovation it can deliver to everyone means having the structures and organization in place to tap it fully.
• Is based on open standards, or protocols and formats that are
moving toward standardization, that are independent of their implementation. Cloud computing is still a relatively nascent
technology. As such, standardization in the sense of “official” standards blessed by standards bodies is still in early days. That said, approaches to interoperability that aren’t under the control of individual vendors and that aren’t tied to specific platforms offer important flexibility. This allows the API specification to evolve beyond implementation constraints and creates the opportunity for communities and organizations to develop variants that meet their individual technical and commercial requirements.
Benefits of an open cloud
Only an open cloud delivers on the full strategic business value and promise of cloud computing. By embracing open clouds organizations ensure the following benefits:
1. Cloud Efficiencies Everywhere
An open cloud brings the benefits of cloud across all of your IT resources, not just a subset. 2. You Avoid Cloud Silos
Building a cloud silo or turning an existing management silo into a cloud just increases overall IT management complexity 3. Easy On-ramp Without Migration
An open cloud provides a straightforward path for enterprises, not an expensive migration process. 4. You’re in control
An open cloud prevents one vendor from controlling your economic model and your access to innovation. 5. Achieve the Ultimate in Portability and Interoperability
An open cloud allows you to manage applications and data across your choice of a diverse infrastructure. Source: Red Hat
FIGURE 1
Open Cloud – Closed Cloud
Only by embracing clouds that are open across the full gamut of characteristics can organizations ensure that their cloud delivers the full strategic value promised by cloud computing. An open cloud isn’t a nice-to-have for IT organizations. It’s a must-have.
Interactive Resources
On demand webinar: CIO to CIO on open cloud
Red Hat’s CIO shares key considerations and benefits of building Red Hat’s open cloud architecture.
https://redhat.webex.com/redhat/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=EC& rI D=6390267&rKey=724EF634A8E01B58
Video: Investigate open cloud
Learn how an open approach to cloud puts you in control of your decisions and choices.
FIGURE 1
Private, Community and Public Cloud Services
• Choose vendors and technologies for private cloud carefully; there is a significant variety of vendor strategies on how to connect to cloud providers and which providers they enable.
• Especially in larger enterprises, consider the evolution to hybrid cloud computing as part of a broader strategy to position IT as the broker for a broad mix of IT services delivered in many different ways – hybrid IT.
Analysis
Private cloud computing is a hot trend in 2012, but enterprises choosing vendors and building architectures need to design private clouds with a longer-term strategy in mind – enabling interoperability and hybrid cloud computing within the broader context of transforming IT toward hybrid IT (becoming the broker of IT services for the enterprise). Infrastructure-as-a-service private cloud
computing is gaining popularity, but IT organizations should focus long-term architecture design on enabling a hybrid cloud model, where private cloud services combine with public cloud services for better flexibility and cost efficiency.
Gartner Foundational
This research is reviewed periodically for accuracy. It was last reviewed on 11 March 2013.
Overview
Polls and inquiries show a growing interest in hybrid cloud computing for infrastructure as a service (IaaS). While technologies and providers for the hybrid cloud model are very nascent, private cloud architectures today should be designed with hybrid in mind. Managing this evolution is part of the overall transformation toward “hybrid IT.”
Key Findings
• Most private and community cloud services will evolve over time to a hybrid model. • A cloud service that spans both private
and public cloud implementations, or both on-premises private and off-premises private or public cloud implementations, is a hybrid cloud service.
• Hybrid cloud connections can be static (done at provisioning time) or dynamic (rebalancing constantly); static connections will be the most common. • Technologies, vendors and business
models are still nascent, but emerging to enable hybrid cloud services.
Recommendations
• Design private cloud deployments with interoperability and future hybrid cloud computing in mind.
Taking a Step Back: Private,
Community and Public Cloud
Services
A private cloud service is defined by privacy, not location, ownership or management (see Figure 1). It is a service that is either used by a single user (typically an enterprise or agency) or an implementation that is unshared (typically delivered by a public cloud provider, as a fenced-off virtual private cloud offering). It can be on-premises or off-premises, customer- or managed, and customer- or provider-owned. Conversely, a public cloud service is delivered by an external service provider, it is open to any user and the implementation is shared. A unique offering between the two is a community cloud service, which is like a private cloud service in that the users are limited to a defined set of users, but also like a public cloud service in that the implementation is shared with more than one user (typically, multiple enterprises or agencies) in a cooperative manner.
From the Gartner Files:
Design Your Private
5
Private and community cloud services are appealing to enterprises because they offer the necessary security and privacy, protect proprietary algorithms and data, maintain regulatory compliance and ensure service levels. The downside of on-premises private and community clouds is usually less elasticity and scaling – requiring more excess stand-by capacity, and therefore potentially higher capital costs (and risks). However, service provider offerings of hosted private, virtual private, public cloud services and blended offerings will mature. Also, technologies to bridge on-premises and off-premises cloud service providers are already emerging, and will continue to mature – both for IaaS (e.g., VMware vCloud Director) and platform as a service (e.g., Microsoft System Center 2012 App Controller with Azure). While private and community cloud services will be popular first-instance offerings of cloud services, they will evolve into hybrid cloud models over time.
The Many Forms of “Hybrid”
There are many ways that an IT service can be considered “hybrid”: a mix of physical and virtual resources, a mix of multiple providers, a mix of proprietary and public resources, a mix of private and public networking, a mix of cloud with noncloud services and resources, a mix of shared and nonshared equipment and a mix of on-premises with off-premises services. In addition, service providers that offer cloud services are also beginning to offer “blended hosting” services that include cloud services and more traditional (noncloud) hosting. For private cloud services, three important forms of hybrid are:• On-premises private clouds combined with off-premises private clouds • On-premises private clouds combined
with off-premises public clouds
Hybrid cloud services like these horizontally span two complete implementations. A single service request could be deployed in either implementation, moved from one to the other, or can horizontally grow between the two implementations (also called cloudbursting or overdrafting). The primary benefit is flexibility of deployment, managed security and elasticity. This is contrasted with a cloud service that relies completely on another cloud service in a supply chain where the service is incomplete without the connection between the multiple implementations. The primary benefit of a cloud supply chain is separation of concerns (e.g., multiple cloud providers each doing part of the overall service).
Minding the Gap
The connection between the cloud services in a hybrid cloud can be more static, or more dynamic and pervasive. A static connection implies that a service instance is deployed to either the private cloud or to a secondary cloud service at provisioning time – perhaps based on policy, on current private cloud utilization or both. A static connection could also rebalance cloud placement of service instances when cloud service capacity requires it – for example, certain service instances could be moved to the secondary cloud service during peak loads, thus requiring more primary private cloud resources. Static connections will be much more prevalent, especially over the next few years as hybrid cloud computing moves from concept to more mainstream.
A dynamic connection would imply rapid scaling and rebalancing between cloud providers, eliminating the boundaries between the two, and perhaps even having service instances span both provider footprints. A dynamic connection will usually require significant application work to enable cross-cloud federation, significant work on gateways between two providers, and will be hampered by latency and speed-of-light constraints. While powerful in concept, dynamic rebalancing and cloud federation will remain a niche trend.
There will be several methods that enable federation between two cloud providers in a hybrid cloud service (and boundaries between them may blur over time): • Direct connections will use the cloud
service’s APIs “directly” – for example, coded into an application.
• External cloud connectors enable interoperability to a cloud service provider (gateway), or talk to corresponding cloud connectors at the cloud service (bridge). • Cloud service brokers can manage the
role of external cloud connectors and manage communication with multiple cloud service providers. Cloud service brokers will commonly be third parties, especially for midmarket enterprises – in essence, system integrators for cloud services, often providing value-added services. In large enterprises, IT will often evolve to take on the role of cloud services brokerage – a part of IT’s transition to managing hybrid IT.
Source: Gartner (February 2012)
FIGURE 2
The Virtualization Road Map Through Private Cloud Computing
Automating the process of rebalancing and sourcing decisions is the job of a service governor, or cloud orchestrator. Cloud management platforms (CMPs) are emerging that provide the technologies for orchestration, connection and brokering – but it is a very nascent market.
What Are Enterprises Planning?
Although there have been few actual deployments of hybrid cloud services so far, market interest is very high. For virtualization-based IaaS, there is a strong interest in evolving to a hybrid model as services and technologies mature. During Gartner’sDecember 2011 Data Center Conference, a road map describing stages of IaaS evolution, starting with virtualization, was presented. The path from virtualization to private to hybrid will be a common one (see Figure 2); however, enterprises could also start by leveraging public cloud services first and enable hybrid later.
Attendees were then asked the question, “By 2015, how would you describe your virtualization progress?” (see Figure 3).
Forty-five percent said that they would want to be managing both their on-premises and off-premises virtual machines centrally. In conversations with attendees, we heard of significant plans to examine CMPs to enable a private cloud soon, and orchestration and hybrid connectivity in the future. Interest in hybrid cloud computing is high.
7
FIGURE 3
Gartner Data Center Conference Poll (n = 104)
What Should Enterprises Do?
Cloud computing services and technologies continue to evolve. According to Gartner clients, the trend toward private cloud deployments is rapidly growing in 2012. CMPs are rapidly evolving, but the dozens of CMPs today will shake out significantly over the next two years through failures and acquisitions. Gartner recommends that private cloud deployments be designed with a longer-term strategy in mind – specifically, private cloud services should be designed to enable hybrid cloud computing in the future. Many CMP vendors have early hybrid connectivity technologies, but there is significant variety in the market in terms of how they interoperate, which service providers they enable and how the hybrid services can be managed. Build a CMP architecture based on immediate private cloud requirements, but ensuring future hybrid expansion.The big picture is that large-enterprise IT is evolving from a host of equipment to a broker of IT-based services – whether they are traditional services, public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud or some blend. Gartner calls this new model hybrid IT. Midmarket and smaller enterprises will likely rely more on external cloud service brokers over time (and, in fact, until those brokers emerge, smaller enterprises won’t move far into leveraging public cloud services). The evolution from private cloud deployments to hybrid to possibly even public for some services will be an opportunity for enterprises to decide where responsibility for service delivery lies, regardless of sourcing – within the enterprise IT department or with external brokers.
Bottom Line
Most private cloud and community cloud services will evolve over time to a hybrid model – at least for service placement, provisioning, and, occasionally, movement between providers. The market for CMPs is immature and exploding, but the market will shake out due to failures and acquisitions during the next two years. Enterprises should design private cloud architectures with hybrid and provider interoperability in mind. Before deploying CMPs, understand what provider architectures are being enabled and which ones are not. Longer term, the evolution to hybrid cloud computing will be part of the overall transition of larger enterprise IT organizations to hybrid IT becoming the broker of a variety of services and sourcing for the enterprise.
Source: Gartner Core RAS Research, G00230748, Thomas J. Bittman, 24 February 2012
Red Hat was founded in 1993 and is headquartered in Raleigh, NC. Today, with more than 60 offices around the world, Red Hat is the largest publicly traded technology company fully com- mitted to open source. That commitment has paid off over time, for us and our customers, prov- ing the value of open source software and establishing a viable business model built around the open source way. Red Hat provides enterprise-strength, mission critical, software and services in today’s most important IT areas: Operating Systems, Storage, Middleware, Virtualization, and Cloud Computing. Red Hat’s open source model supplies enterprise computing solutions that reduce costs, improve performance, reliability and security. Learn more about Red Hat’s open cloud solutions at www.redhat. com/solutions/cloud-computing/ or by contacting a representative in your region.
About Red Hat
NORTH AMERICA
1–888–REDHAT1 www.redhat.com
EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA 00800 7334 2835 www.europe.redhat.com europe@redhat.com ASIA PACIFIC +65 6490 4200 www.apac.redhat.com apac@redhat.com LATIN AMERICA +54 11 4329 7300 www.latam.redhat.com info-latam@redhat.com
Why Should Your Cloud Be Designed With Open And Hybrid in Mind? is published by Red Hat. Editorial supplied by Red Hat is independent of Gartner analysis. All Gartner research is © 2013 by Gartner, Inc. All rights reserved. All Gartner materials are used with Gartner’s permission. The use or publication of Gartner research does not indicate Gartner’s endorsement of Red Hat’s products and/or strategies. Reproduction or distribution of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner’s Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding Principles on
