This post is part of a series based on a presentation I did to the London VMware User Group on February 25th, 2010 about the reality of Enterprise scale internal cloud platforms. To find other posts in the series, just look for the tag “Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth”.
Bonus content When I first started putting together my VMUG presentation, it was actually solely focused on this particular topic. I’ll link to the original presentation at the end, as I think it’s better if you read the post first.
Another of the challenges you’ll face along the way of Cloud is that of how to measure exactly what it is you are offering. But having a look at what the industry is doing won’t give you much help… as with so many things in IT, there is no standard. Amazon have their EC2 unit, and state that it is roughly the equivalent of 1.0-1.2GHz of a 2007 Opteron or Xeon CPU. With Azure, Microsoft haven’t gone down the same path – their indicative pricing/sizing shows a base compute unit of 1.6GHz with no indication as to what is underneath. Rackspace flip the whole thing on it’s head by deciding that memory is the primary resource constraint, therefore they’ll just charge for that and presumably give you as much CPU as you want (but with no indication as to the characteristics of the underlying CPU). Which way should you go? IMHO, none of the above.
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This post is part of a series based on a presentation I did to the London VMware User Group on February 25th, 2010 about the reality of Enterprise scale internal cloud platforms. To find other posts in the series, just look for the tag “Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth”.
Last post I talked about challenging convention, but you can go too far in doing so. Depending on the depth of your operational knowledge of the environment you work in, it’s easy to do just that and if you don’t consult with the ops teams until the last minute you could be in for a nasty surprise. And so the best thing to do, even if you think you know how things run, is to get operational representation onboard early. Like day one of the project early.
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This post is part of a series based on a presentation I did to the London VMware User Group on February 25th, 2010 about the reality of Enterprise scale internal cloud platforms. To find other posts in the series, just look for the tag “Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth”.
In the previous post, I talked about some of the things that you should think about before going ahead with an internal Cloud project. And I ended saying you should challenge the way things are done currently if they are impossible or very difficult to automate. But there are other things you should also challenge that aren’t directly related to automation, and I’ll cover some of those now.
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This post is part of a series based on a presentation I did to the London VMware User Group on February 25th, 2010 about the reality of Enterprise scale internal cloud platforms. To find other posts in the series, just look for the tag “Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth”.
The notion of GIGO is of course much older than I am, but it’s one of those concepts that is timeless. In relation to Cloud, it’s more pertinent than ever. The marketing hype would have you believe that Cloud is a panacea, and many people hawking their wares artfully dodge the subject of your existing tools and processes. But ignore these at your own peril. The COO of the company I work for has a great quote, which goes something like “God made the earth in 6 days, because he started with a clean slate.”. The same is true of internal Cloud (or whatever you want to call it – I’m going to call it that for the sake of convenience) – you could probably nail down the platform code and functionality that you want to launch with in a few weeks, but making the requisite changes to existing processes and integrating with existing tools in your environment is what will take the lion’s share of time to address.
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By stu | February 26, 2010
Well the London VMUG has come and gone, and I’ve had my 15 minutes of fame… actually maybe a little bit less, time was a bit short and I rushed it a little bit. As with most VMUGs, it’s hard to gauge the level of experience and size of environments in the room. To some people, 1000 VM’s is a lot. Others have ESX host counts around that number. So I wasn’t sure how relevant people would find my presentation, but I felt the information was worthwhile presenting anyway.
As the title suggests, I was talking about some practical considerations (10 of them to be precise) that you should think about if you’re looking to develop an Enterprise scale internal compute cloud – which I am very proud to say I can speak about with experience as our first platform release went into code freeze 2 weeks ago and is currently in UAT. I am hoping at some point we’ll be able to go public with what we have, time will tell.
But in the meantime, have a read of my presentation and let me know your thoughts (I’m still closing comments on here 2 weeks after each post due to the high amount of spam, but you can always get me on twitter or email vinternals at gmail dot com). The presentation is suitably minimalistic, and so I will embark on a series of posts talking to each slide in order to bring some clarity to the points. So if anything in there interests you, be sure to keep an eye out on Twitter for post announcements over the next few weeks!
By stu | February 18, 2010
A shameless self promotional post, but I never blogged about this when it was released and it’s never too late to do the right thing 
.
I personally have a huge preference for reading books in PDF format, a little while ago one of my favourite publishers APress had a deal whereby if you had a physical copy of the book, you could get the PDF version for a ridiculously low price. But we’ve gone one better… you don’t even need to own the physcial book, you can still get the PDF from lulu for a mere $10 USD / £6 – that’s less than 2 pints!
vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide PDF version
And don’t forget to grab the PowerShell scripts via Duncans site, even if you don’t have the book or PDF they are totally free!
By stu | January 26, 2010
Yes that’s right, I was very flattered to be asked to present at the next London VMUG and just couldn’t say no to Piglet (illustrious London VMUG co-ordinator). The more people there, the more nervous I am bound to be so let’s have a massive showing and try to give me a nervous breakdown! If you haven’t been before, be sure to register by sending an email to as per the announcement. And a personal thankyou to Pano Logic for sponsoring the event this time round – it couldn’t happen without the sponsors, it is very much appreciated.
As for the topic, I’ll be talking about real world Enterprise Cloud but in a sufficiently generic way – I’m talking as ’stu the blogger at vinternals’, not ’stu the employee of Company X’ (Company X’s competitive advantage will remain safe! You hear that, senior managers at Company X who don’t even know about let alone condone this blog? No need for alarm!). I will not be mentioning any products either, so regardless of the technology platform or what stage you are at with your own Enterprise Cloud implementations, hopefully you’ll find the discussion useful. Or not, you might think I’m talking complete shit. But you won’t know unless you go, so why not come along and tell me what you think in person (over a beer afterwards ).
