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Cloud Computing Is Attractive For Its Transparency: Red Hat
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Bryan Che, senior director and general manager, Cloud Business unit, Red Hat, talks to Dilin Anand of EFY about the business side of Cloud Computing.
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Friday, December 07, 2012:
Red Hat is a provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services.
Bryan Che, senior director and general manager, Cloud Business unit, Red Hat, talks to Abhishek Mutha and Dilin Anand of EFY about the business side of Cloud Computing.
What all do you focus on, to develop the Cloud Computing Business?
From very early days, Cloud has been an abundant architecture element in terms of what Red Hat has been doing. So from a cloud perspective, we are continuously focused on driving forward cloud computing architecture across everything we do, which includes Linux, Jboss, Virtualization and full of brand new products in the market, in terms of high implemented cloud. We should not only concentrate on new class specific technologies that we need to build business around customers, but also help customers take advantage of all the great technologies that we already have because up and down the technology stack as we implement the cloud, we want to make sure that customers take all the advantage of all the great things that we are doing in the open source.
Could you elaborate a bit more on your business model?
We are focused on infrastructure platform components. We don't offer software as a service, however, we do work with many partners who build software solutions on top of Red Hat. Our primary goal as a company is to help enterprises as well as cloud providers implement their cloud technology and their cloud. So basically we do everything that is required like building an operating system, virtualize data centres, get data from cloud, replicate it and distribute it across an environment, manage infrastructure, get work loads into the cloud, provide application development environment for software as a service, give developers platform as a service. We have a very strong technology stack up to the platform as a service area and we work with our partners. We have many partners who build software applications on top of infrastructure and on top of the platforms that we provide.
So what is the most challenging part of this process, of moving the company infrastructure onto a cloud?
First of all, the reason that cloud computing is so attractive, especially from an enterprise point of view, is its transparency. Taking a look at the public cloud providers like the Amazons, IBM, NTT communications and so on, they have not only made it easier to go and get cloud computing capacity on-the-flight but they have also made it very transparent, which means assessment of how efficiently they run their data centres compared to enterprises and every single dimension like how quickly they can spin up capacity, cost, and administrators that are required for a certain capacity compared to enterprise IT. Every enterprise is trying to figure out how to move from their existing environment, which although more complex still has all kinds of capabilities.
What is the primary strategy used to aid the transition?
Enterprises cannot consider cloud computing to be something where they can install a new cloud and throw all the existing infrastructure and then move towards cloud. If it's a service provider doing something brand new, they have the luxury of building a brand new infrastructure but enterprises don't have that luxury. So the question arises on the transition of enterprises. Secondly, it's necessary to work with a wide variety of different software. So the focus of this particular strategy is that we are going to give them a cloud architecture and portfolio that works with their choice of physical systems, virtualisation technology, and public cloud providers so that they are already dealing with a heterogeneous role and they can also bring cloud computing across all that heterogeneous technology. In future, enterprises are going to need to evolve to new technology so they would not want to take one giant step towards cloud but incrementally build towards it. The big challenge is giving customers Open Hybrid cloud architecture so that they can start to incrementally adopt cloud, bring the value of cloud, and start to reap benefit across everything that they're doing. We are trying to tackle that challenge to become more efficient cloud provider by doing it in the context of a much more complex IT environment.
What would be the key take away or benefit from the perspective of the small and medium companies when they move onto cloud?
Small and medium size companies are still dealing with a lot of complexity but they often have even lesser skill-sets to be able to manage that complexity. They started to virtualise the infrastructure and got VMware all over the place but now they have all sorts of different virtualisation clusters, which are totally different. Cloud can provide a lot of benefits because it can help provide them in the uniform way to be able to manage consistently across all these different styles that have been cropping up and introduce all this complexity. We make it much more uniform and start to bring a uniform cloud across it even though underneath it might be heterogeneously complex. They can now start to automate it and get much more efficient, especially as a smaller company to be able to figure out how to scale resources with my environment.
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Is there a limit on what kind of programming languages the client can use?
One of the goals at Red Hat is giving customer utmost choice, freedom and flexibility. For example, talking about languages for developers, that is typically in the platform as a service run. One of the offerings we have as platform as a service is OpenShift. OpenShift is very different from the other passes in the market as we give developers freedom to use their language, framework, and cloud of their choice. For example, if you look at Google App Engine or Roku, these clouds have their own proprietary APIs. We can't bring existing applications into their pass. Once written to their pass, it can never be taken out. It is the converse with OpenShift, because we build on top of open source Red Hat enterprise Linux and Jboss middle ware, it is the exact same versions that our customers can run elsewhere. Ruby on rails, Python, PHP, and everything that runs on top of Linux will also be able to run on top of OpenShift. We even have an extension mechanism for OpenShift cartridge system so that if something is not supported out-of-the-box, it can be packaged as a cartridge. If a person has written his own proprietary claim and wishes to use some other data center, he should plug into OpenShift and so there is total flexibility. If not satisfied with our cloud, the person can move to some other cloud and from one data centre to next.
What financial considerations come into play, when a firm moves to a cloud based system?
From a financial consideration stand-point, high approach cloud is going to have a very big impact in terms of benefit. One strategy that a lot of people are pushing is selling a 'cloud in a box solution'. That's very expensive for enterprises because now they have to migrate all their existing infrastructure on to this new cloud before actually reaping the benefits. So picking the right cloud computing strategy is important. Consider VM Works, that is going to have huge cost implications down the line because a cloud can be built only on top of VM Works hyper visor. Other important considerations are methods on how to incrementally adopt cloud. A strategy is needed such that it's not necessary to buy cloud all at once and drop it into the data center. There should be freedom to pick and choose. Open source provides tremendous value when compared to proprietary.
How do you determine whether a particular service is a good candidate for cloud?
It depends on position in terms of the life cycle and approach. A brand new user of cloud computing would typically want to pick an area that's easier to start, so there are a few attributes he can look for. He could start with something that's not mission-critical like a development or test because if something goes wrong it would be better to do one thing at a time and not put the most important application into the cloud. The cloud today is good at scaling but not as good dealing with physical limitations like network bandwidth and so on. It's possible to solve some of these things but it is a lot more challenging to solve them. In the end, it would be better to take an area that's a little easier to get started with which doesn't have a big impact on an existing business but starts to get more value when moved towards cloud.
For a mid-size company, if they transition into cloud, what kind of differences would the IT department have to make? What would they have to change their focus onto?
There are lot things that change when a company moves to cloud. One of the biggest fundamental changes is introduction of self-service provisioning. Currently with enterprises, their IT Department manages the whole software infrastructure. So whatever runs on the server is managed, provisioned, patched, and counted by them. When cloud computing is introduced, there are already developers and other end users via self-service portal, provisioning these systems. IT is no longer responsible for provisioning. Instead there are developers who don't care about compliance, standard operating environment, security, and regulations. So the question that arises here is how to get IT working with these user developers in a way that things can still be enforced that IT is responsible for. Developers can still be very productive and get their self-service environments.
The other things that change are applications stacks and figuring out ways to manage them. If having applications that come under Amazon, Vmware, or physical systems, it's necessary to have a system set of tools that can deal with all the diversity of the infrastructure as it's not only going under physical systems any more. So there needs to be a much more powerful set of capabilities to manage applications across all these different environments. Also, managing the cost should be kept in mind and understanding quality of service from the different providers. In terms of experience, it's going to be completely different comparing a public cloud versus a private cloud. There are a lot of things that start to change when cloud computing is started. An important thing to keep in mind is understanding the changes because if an enterprise shift to cloud without enough preparation and anticipation for that change, it's going to introduce all sort of complexities. On the other hand, Red Hat is working with its customers and training them. We have software products that address lot of these challenges and we work hand-in-hand to help customers through that transition. So it's very important to understand upfront what is in store and as the transition is being made, it's better to have a plan that how you are going to deal with this transition.
Are there any minimum requirements that a firm should have when they plan to make a transition?
There are a lot of things that should be looked at because there is a process that must be followed. For example, if I'm a company and I'm running all my systems on Big Iron UNIX, it's going to be very difficult for me to make my next step cloud. Getting one from UNIX onto LINUX, they have to start to virtualise and put best practices into the environment and then push them into a cloud. So there's a migration pattern.
How does cloud allow a business to get to market faster?
It doesn't necessarily but it has the potential to do so. It depends on the transition to cloud and whether it was done the right way. If someone has a good cloud and it provides the ability to go ahead and get infrastructure much faster, then that saves a lot of time. It might take three months to get the hardware provision but with cloud, the same infrastructure can be achieved in a matter of minutes which saves months off the time-to-market. Dealing with platform as a service, developers can be much more efficient because instead of giving them an infrastructure and spending two days configuring that environment with all the right software and so on, it's automatically given to them in a self-service portal, which is instinctively productive in terms of writing applications. All these things can potentially provide tremendous benefits but it has to be made sure that one must know where to take advantage of these. Done properly, there's tremendous time-to-value.
Are there any particular trends that you see in this sector?
Cloud computing sector is moving very fast though we are still in an early stage. One of the things that we are being very careful about from Red Hat perspective is providing an open hybrid cloud architecture so that as things evolve, there is flexibility to take advantage of new technologies as they come in. We necessarily don't know what's going to be the next greatest thing but we know from a velocity standpoint, things are going to become much more open. People are going to go from proprietary storage to open source software. They're going to go from proprietary networking to software networking. They have already made the switch from UNIX to LINUX. So through all that there's going to be changes in all parts of the infrastructure and locking into a particular technology is undesirable today because that's going to change in the future. With Red Hat, we are focused on how to give an open architecture in an Open Hybrid Cloud so that as things change and commodotise and go open source, new technologies need to be considered.
Dilin Anand, EFYTIMES News Network
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