Matt Johnson, Principal Infrastructure Architect at Eduserv shares his thoughts on Hybrid Cloud with the IT Service Management Forum

1. The Move to Hybrid Cloud
Benefits and challenges to IT Service Management
Matt Johnson, April 2015

2. Agenda
• Recap – what is cloud anyway?
• Deployment, Service models
• Essential characteristics
• The Hybrid cloud model
• Service Management in a hybrid cloud world
• Service Design: Capacity, InfoSec, Supplier Mgmt
• Service Transition: Change, Asset/Config, Release Mgmt
• Service Improvement: Service Measurement & Reporting
• Recommendations

3. Recap:
What is Cloud, anyway?

4. Recap: What is Cloud anyway?

5. Cloud Models
• Cloud Deployment models
• Public – multi-tenanted Internet-based service (AWS)
• Private – single-tenanted, closed-network service (vCloud)
• Community – multi-tenanted service aimed at a specific user group
• Hybrid – Combination of 2 (or more) cloud infrastructures
• Today’s focus is on Hybrid Cloud models

6. Cloud Models
• Cloud Service Models
• IaaS – compute, storage, networking services
• PaaS – managed platform that supports app development
• SaaS – managed software delivered via a web browser
• Today’s focus is on IaaS service models

7. Cloud Characteristics
• Essential Characteristics
• Broad Network Access
• Resource Pooling
• Rapid Elasticity
• Measured Service
• On Demand Self-Service

8. Essential Characteristics

9. Broad Access – addressing usability
• Traditional IT has historically been “siloed”
• Vertical deployments of application stacks for specific purposes
• Access to these silos is controlled independently
• Integration across services is limited
• This isn’t always a bad thing!
• Security, accountability, control are all increased
• But this approach…
• …has resulted in “planning blight”, and
• Leads to the use of “Shadow IT”

10. Broad access – more than one way…
Cloud
Service
Web console
Command
Line
REST API
Development
SDK
3rd party
integration

11. Resource pooling – addressing efficiency
• Consolidation of workloads
• More efficient use of infrastructure
• Higher availability (through HA)
• Lower infrastructure costs
• Comes at a price
• Less spare capacity to scale,
unless you purchase “spare”
• Failure of physical servers impact
more services

12. Resource pooling – benefits at scale
Organisation with
200 physical servers:
~ $6,500 per server
Cloud provider with
20k+ physical servers:
~ $1,000 per server

13. • Traditional architecture design
requires adopting one of two
approaches:
• Design for peak load – results in
unused capacity
• Design for average load – results
in over-subscribed capacity
• Virtualisation can help solve
compute capacity, but not:
• Network / storage capacity
• Scaling automation
Elasticity – addressing capacity

14. Elasticity (rapid scalability)
• Public cloud provides “infinite”
(from a typical customer’s
viewpoint) scalability
• Deals with the “hard” stuff that
virtualisation doesn’t:
• Scaling network/bandwidth
• Scaling storage
• Scaling automation

15. Measured Service – addressing purchasing
• IT has traditionally been a cost centre
• Pressure to reduce costs
• Expenditure linked to budget cycles
• Typically high CapEx for new projects
• IT increasingly adds value to business
• Showback / Chargeback are attempts to
represent this value to individual business
units
• Very difficult to apportion core infrastructure
costs (switching, network, etc.)

16. Measured Service – pay as you go
• Cloud services charge based on use
• Discount levels for bulk usage
• No minimum contract periods
• Detailed metrics, which can be categorised as required

17. The Hybrid Cloud model
Private + Public = Hybrid

18. Hybrid Cloud
• At its simplest, Hybrid cloud simply connects two (or more)
cloud services via defined mechanism(s)
• In practice, there are two distinct patterns for service delivery:
• Discrete – individual services reside on a single, specific cloud
• Integrated – individual services are managed & delivered
transparently across the hybrid cloud infrastructure
• Management services are similar:
• Discrete – each cloud is managed individually
• Integrated – combined management stack

19. Why Hybrid?
• Allows you to make best use of the strengths of each type
of cloud platform:
• Public Cloud (such as AWS):
• Scale, pace of innovation, elasticity, additional functionality, price
• Private Cloud (such as vCloud):
• Security, customisation, compliance, control
• Provides a transition path from fully on-premise services
• Great for pilot / PoC / development / DR service provision
• Lots of different justifications; in practice, it comes down to:
• Public cloud = agility
• Private cloud = control

20. Public cloud capability (AWS)

21. Private Cloud control (Eduserv)
• Secure Compute Cloud
• Government-accredited infrastructure (“IL2”, “IL3”)
• UK data sovereignty – UK owned and operated datacentre
• Specialist network connectivity (PSN, Janet, WAN, etc.)
• Capability for external audits

22. Hybrid Cloud – Management considerations
• Infrastructure
• Deployment tools are likely to be different to on-premise IT
• Be aware of subtle differences, esp. if you are used to vSphere
• Network connectivity
• Fast, low-latency links are important where services are integrated
• OS & application management
• Existing tools should be compatible, but…
• …may not be able to handle “cloud-native” designs
• Think about how you architect directory services across clouds
• Start simple!

23. Hybrid Cloud Service Management
Some considerations

24. Capacity Management
• Hybrid “Cloud Bursting” is (in most cases) a myth
• Scaling a service tier across a hybrid cloud is complex and costly
• Keep tiers within a single cloud (i.e. web on public, app on private)
• Try to place “bursty” services onto public cloud infrastructure
• Long-term stable services are a good fit for private cloud
• There’s no such thing as “spare” capacity on a public cloud
• You pay for anything that is running / being used
• Turn on when you need it, off when you don’t
• Public cloud is great for off-site storage (object/tape storage)
• Push (encrypted) backup data, with retention/lifecycle policies

25. Supplier Management
• One of the most important hybrid cloud
processes to understand
• Understand cloud providers T&Cs
• Unlikely you will be able to modify the terms
• Understand data retention, termination,
payment requirements
• Understand cloud provider service levels
• What SLAs are offered? What are the
exclusions?
• Typically SLAs are against the entire
infrastructure, NOT single VMs

26. Information Security
• Not always as clear-cut as private > public re. security
• Cloud providers existence depend on delivering secure services
• However legal compliance is sometimes out of their control
• For IaaS service models, OS responsibility is still yours
• Patching, AV, IDS/IPS, hardening, etc.
• Key aspect of hybrid cloud is integrated monitoring
• Similar tools across public/private clouds to protect OS and apps
• Control access to Cloud provider APIs / user accounts
• Enforce strong passwords, 2FA, access controls
• Difficult to overstate the importance of this requirement

27. Change Management
• Make use of cloud service tools
• Audit logs (such as AWS CloudTrail, Config)
• See if your existing toolsets can integrate with your public cloud
• Remember that some changes are cloud-initiated
• e.g. Auto-scaling of instances due to load / bandwidth capacity
• As with configuration management, it’s the auto-scaling policy
that should be under change control, not the instances
themselves

28. Asset & Configuration Management
• Cloud assets are often transient
• Created and destroyed based on demand requirements
• Auto-scaling instances are identical
• Cattle v Pets analogy
• Asset manage the template,
not the instance
• Disable management connectivity to
individual instances
• Version your templates/config

29. Release Management
• Approach depends on architectural design
• Cloud-native application:
• Continuous integration / deployment
• Blue / green deployment
• Rolling upgrades
• Enterprise applications
• Existing approaches can be used
• Beware of public cloud limitations (snapshots, rollbacks)
• DevOps approach is worth investigation
• Combine Development and Operations skills within a team

30. Service Reporting
• Public clouds provide great metrics
• But you have to work to integrate them with your systems
• And decide how much of them you want to share with end-users
• If you haven’t already, invest in a centralised data repository
• Lots of options:
• Open-source, such as Elasticsearch
• COTS, such as MS SQLAnalytics
• Cloud-based, such as SumoCloud or Splunk
• The benefits far outweigh the costs of implementation

31. Conclusions

32. Cloud is not just hype…
• …done right, Public cloud provides:
• Scale, elasticity, self-service, metered usage
• The agility to deploy new services rapidly with no CapEx
• However, Private cloud is still vital for:
• Sensitive services that are required to be hosted locally
• Stable, long-running service with known workloads
• Hybrid cloud allows you the best of both worlds
• But requires you to adapt your processes to accommodate both
• How far those adaptations go depend on how “bought-in” you are
• Lots of good practice in the market – make use of it!

33. QUESTIONS?
Thank you!
Matt Johnson
Principal Infrastructure Architect, Eduserv
Web: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/services/cloud/
Twitter: @mhj_work
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mhjwork