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GE CTO On Moving 9,000 Apps To the Public Cloud
StewBeans writes: The Wall Street Journal recently published a special report on the staggering growth of the hybrid cloud, citing research from multiple sources, including survey results from Gartner indicating that 75% of large enterprises planned to take advantage of the hybrid cloud by end of this year. The article said that, "CIOs are demanding a way to combine the best of the cloud with their own localized data centers. Few companies or organizations are willing or able to move all of their IT to the public cloud." GE is apparently one of those few companies, because the CTO of Cloud for GE recently wrote that they are moving the vast bulk of their 9,000 applications into the public cloud. In the article, he explains how they came to this counterintuitive decision, their strategy for moving so many apps to the cloud, and why he's more optimistic about the public cloud versus hybrid or private.
survey results from Gartner indicating that 75% of large enterprises planned to take advantage of the hybrid cloud by end of this year
Gartner reports that enterprises they surveyed "have plans". Just roll your eyes and walk away.
They're large enough and have enough of a cloud presence that they carry weight. Smaller companies moving to the cloud aren't going to get level of service they're expecting. Unless they pay for it of course, and then they'll find out running it in house would have been cheaper.
That way it will be easier to ship all of our IT responsibilities to India or China and not need any Americans involved. That entire cost center will be cut by 75%. What's not to like?
What's that? Corporate espionage?
Nah, they'll be paid well for their standard of living so they won't break the chain of trust. And besides there will be an iron clad contract in place, our lawyers will crush them in court if they do any monkey business.
Such a worrywart! C'mon over here young man and pour me another brandy!
Lance Weaver is the Chief Technology Officer for Cloud at GE Corporate. ... Lance holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Criminal Justice from Truman State University.
"This interconnection oriented architecture means we contract with colocation facilities where we can place our inspection tools and GE services into dense meeting areas of the multi-cloud environment. These are places where you find many cloud providers under one roof and we can place our services, inspection and data sets within them to obtain cloud agnostic, high speed adjacency."
"Another factor in making our journey to public cloud successful is our self-service (or what I call opt-in) approach, which allows business units to choose the services they wish to consume. People will naturally gravitate to high value, frictionless services"
"Running inside a public cloud environment, you're able to consume unlimited capacity as needed. Today, we scale up and down thousands of times in a day while we handle peak loads or run experiments."
"We support approximately 9,000 applications at GE, and our enterprise IT efforts right now are focused on moving the vast bulk of them into public cloud. This may sound like a counter-intuitive strategy, but here is why it’s a great fit for GE."
MBA's bless 'em.
"In our environment, like many others, we ran the bulk of our applications on-premise in private cloud and highly-virtualized environments. Yet we were still dealing with the challenges of demand spikes without sufficient capacity. We had the desire to burst out to external cloud to solve these problems by leveraging a hybrid cloud. "
So you didn't add capacity internally, you bought it externally, and thus lost the biggest advantage of using your own servers: control and security. Worse you made the system more complex as they had to cope with some servers in the public internet.
Worse still, you're using misleading MBA speak. There is no such thing as 'private cloud'. You ran these apps on servers YOU controlled, then you moved those apps to servers controlled BY OTHER COMPANIES ACROSS THE INTERNET. Hopefully you put in the fallback plan for if the company fails, and take regular backups of your data on their servers to make sure you still keep it. What happens when the spotty youth they hired hands your app data to his frat friend? Because while internally the network admins forced security, you lost that when you lost control of your servers.
"However, if we were able to burst out to the external cloud to support our applications then why were we running the applications internally at all? This insight gave us a new perspective on the importance of public cloud in any strategy"
Having pissed away the advantage of having your own servers, what the hell, lets set ourselves up with a third party supplier and hope they won't screw us over... that's a plan right? It says here in "MBA World" that "all good MBAs are leveraging the cloud"!
CLOUD!
I spent all last week hearing about the damn cloud and Oracle OpenWorld. And the company that I work for has their heads in the cloud now. It will be interesting how all the datacenters in the world are consolidated into these cloud providers. They are just making sweet targets for terrorists around the world...
Karma: Bad
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I guess it is better public relations for corporations to lay off IT workers when apps are "moved to the cloud" than when the "datacenter is being outsourced".
I'm a proponent of the cloud when it makes sense, and think that companies should implement a private cloud for their own internal applications. I'm not so sure about a company putting everything out on the public cloud, nor whether the migration will complete. The article says they're 350 apps in, with 1000 targeted for the end of the year. In enterprise IT, an "app" can be anything from the crown jewels to Bob in Accounting's hosted Access database or Excel macros. I'm assuming they're starting with the Access database. :-)
The thing I don't like about the public cloud is the real possibility for permanent vendor lock-in, IBM mainframe style. Prices are low now, but when all the competitors are driven out and the cloud bubble bursts, Amazon and Microsoft are going to slowly turn the prices up. Assuming the cloud provider isn't a security basket case, secure environments can be designed. But, this is GE we're talking about. I guarantee they're wallowing in outsourced-IT mediocrity and managing a massive bloated system. GE was the archetype for the 60s-style conglomerate, so I'm sure they have huge amounts of duplication. They probably have 30 SAP implementations and 20 Oracle ERP systems from the various divisions, acquisitions, etc.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. Just don't forget, big company CIOs, that the public cloud is being subsidized by the latest round of VC funded web startups and phone apps. When that bubble bursts, expect vendors to make their money back in other ways...
Yes, it's other peoples servers, but there is more to it than that. We used to host physical servers at a data center. It was a huge PITA to get new servers provisioned. Moving to virtual servers on other people's servers (aka, the cloud) has been the greatest thing ever for us. Could we host the virtual servers locally? Sure. Do we want to? No. So for me the cloud is not defined by just being someone else's servers, but virtual servers running on some else's servers. It simplifies so much that we would never go back to physical servers or hosting our own virtual servers unless (probably until) some massive problem happens.
"As long as they provide SLA guarantees, who cares."
That SLA won't bring your data back if they lose it and it won't bring customers back decide to go elsewhere after that "cloud" doesn't live up to the SLA. An SLA is not a guarantee it is more like insurance.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Just because a CEO/CIO mentions the word "cloud", it doesn't mean they do not understand the concept. If you had read the article, you'll see the reasons they went to the cloud, the biggest seems to be they are tired of keeping a lot of excess capacity around for spikes of computing work. It is simply cheaper. And they aren't just tossing apps into the cloud. They (at least they claim) are evaluating the risk for each app and binning them accordingly. The ones with the highest risk get the most oversight.
They seem to believe they can get the security necessary in the cloud. Under that assumption, why should they duplicate cloud services when that is not part of any of GE's primary businesses? GE is a serious company, they aren't about to throw stuff into the cloud and jeopardize their company on the mere whim of a CEO or CIO. They'll have reams of documentation on how it can be achieved, what it will cost, the risks involved, etc.
Yup, the financial services wing has been under-performing the manufacturing part of the company since 2007 and because of GE's size they were going to be labelled a systemic risk by the Fed which would have brought a huge amount of auditing and capital requirements that would have further dragged on the company.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.