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VMware: Hey, Other Cloud Services Exist
Nerval's Lobster writes "VMware has updated its cloud-management portfolio to support alternative tools, including Amazon's platform. That's a big step for the company, which for some time seemed to shy away from the idea of backing heterogeneous cloud environments. VMware's vFabric Application Director 5.0 is designed to, in the company's words, 'provision applications on any cloud.' That includes Amazon's EC2. The platform includes pre-approved operating system and middleware components for modeling and deploying those aforementioned applications, with the ability to use the platform's blueprints for deploying applications across 'multiple virtual and hybrid cloud infrastructures.' The other platform, vCloud Automation Center 5.1, enables 'policy-based provisioning across VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructure, multiple hypervisors and Amazon Web Services.'"
It's quite possible that this move is in response to Microsoft building similar functionality into Hyper-V 2012.
Well, basically those "clouds" are just a cluster of servers running software which provides an interface where you can upload and run multiple VMs.
So for example if you want to run a website, you create a VM with the web server and data, upload it to the cloud service, and then have it run one or more instances to service HTTP requests depending on the traffic at the moment.
It's just a fad. Buying hardware, putting a Linux distro in the CD drive, installing, configuring, driving hardware down to hosting center, installing hardware in a cage, testing, driving home, and then repeated all this when something goes wrong or needs upgrading is much more efficient. Nothing will even compete with a Linux server in a corner / basement / under a desk.
Amazon's offerings are pretty good. And yeah, their persistent use of acronyms is a bit annoying and confusing. It's not so much buzzwords though, as an attempt at branding.
Firstly, if you're just mucking around, it can be cheap. Really cheap. If you're just working on a proof-of-concept, you can possible get a dedicated server for free, as Amazon's prices scale on use, and a test machine isn't going to get a lot of traffic.
Secondly, it can be really fast. Because Amazon's physical hardware is already geographically distributed, you can do the same pretty quickly. If I have a properly setup application, and I decide I want a server physically located in Asia to reduce the latency to customers there, I can have it done in 10 minutes.
Thirdly, its easy. It's got a steep learning curve, but once you're on top of it, backups, disaster recovery, scalability and a whole host of other problems are essentially solved for you.
Sure, there's nothing it can't do that a properly configured and tuned geographically-distributed redundant cluster of linux boxes couldn't, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper, faster and easier than running such a cluster.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
That's the Infrastructure-as-a-service offers. Then there's platform-as-a-service (e.g. App Engine, Heroku) and Software-as-a-service (e.g. Google Docs).
Essentially, cloud means: we abstract and automate everything from this level down, so you don't have to worry about it and can focus on everything above.
And yes, "cloud" is a buzzword for something that already existed. That doesn't mean the concept is bad or useless.
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This is very naive. You only talk of virtual hosting as a cloud. That's a 2006 state-of-the-art.
In fact, the GROWTH in cloud architecture comes as a transition of the traditional, Enterprise data-center. This is the next stage after the large-scale consolidation of Enterprise x86 computing onto a virtual platform for efficiency and cost.
A cloud offers elastic capacity for compute and storage requirements.
Ordering and provisioning are business/enduser driven, from a service catalogue.
All policy enforcement and management functions are topology-gnostic - and largely independent of typical identifiers in non-cloud archetectures (including IP, Port/vlan/subnet mapping).
In fact, the ability for a workload to exhibit elasticity, practically requires topology agnosticism.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Great post, but I do disagree with this:
but it's a hell of a lot cheaper, faster and easier than running such a cluster
This is at best only true on a small/medium scale, but ultimately it really depends on your use case and how on top of your AWS bill you are. My contention is that once you get to the point that you're running thousands of large EC2 instances, you'd actually find it cheaper to deploy and manage servers in your own DC (or a colo).
I'm sure the folks at Netflix will disagree with me, but considering the hundreds of folks they have dedicated to tooling and optimizing their AWS deployment, I'd say they're a special case (plus they likely get big discounts given the amount of cheerleading they do for AWS).
App Director is a pretty interesting product. It's rather different from other offerings from VMWare, but it's not a game changer and it's definitely not the future of the company. It's yet another product in the zillions that the company has. VMWare needs to focus. They seem to have lost a sense of direction since the hypervisors have become more of a commodity.
App Director is a nice Flash-based GUI for Chef, which is really the engine underneath doing the heavy lifting. And no, it does not support any other cloud other than Amazon and vCloud Director. It seems to me that VMWare is adding support for Amazon in a couple of their products so they can say "you see?, we do believe in multiple clouds". Should I call it Cloudwashing? There are other more interesting start-ups out there doing similar things like RightScale, Cliqr or GigaSpaces' Cloudify, all of which focus on the applications vs. the VMs. The problem is that I have a hard time believing that VMWare will ultimately abandon the "VM" as the way they see the world.
You should really come look at what 'current' VMware software looks like and the directions they're going. Things may be further along in 5.1 but my info is good as of the latest patch to 5.0.
vCenter is offered as an appliance VM (vCSA) that is good for many small-medium shops, limited by the database connectivity and integration with other non-essential VMware tools and partner software. While it doesn't yet have the integration with all the addons, they're coming supposedly. It also brings along a web interface good for 90% of your day-to-day, which while built on (what I think is) a crappy framework, it does work. I'd venture a guess that SRM is almost ready for the vCSA environment as it's basically written in Perl. I think EMC has their integration bits working in the web client, and NetApp said they were close.
They don't exactly roll their own web service either, it's tomcat everywhere you look for the web services, all but the esxi hosts require AD integration for authentication and vC uses an ADAM database for linking servers together. I have heard a couple of grumbles about people not liking the windows servers for their VC a year ago, but honestly who has a totally non-windows environment these days?
I'd love to see the whole stack as a group of drop-in appliance VMs, but then again, this is job security right :-P Seriously though, they need a lot of work around the edges for that to happen. It's a major chore if you want to tweak stuff up like change all the certs to trusted certs with your internal enterprise CA or purchased PKI. It'd be cooler if it was easier, but it's not there yet.
----- - The beatings will continue until morale improves
I manage a cloud with nearly 5000 VMs. In a class today we spun up about 350 on the fly so that engineers could have reference configs available to do their jobs. I'm thinking we'll hit around 6000 VMs by the new year.