Establishing Your Cloud Infrastructure

www.GoGrid.com 1 (877) 946-4743 Complex Infrastructure Made Easy™

A GoGrid white paper revealing key factors to consider when choosing the right cloud infrastructure partner for your business.

Pre-Flight Checklist For Cloud Partner Selection

Anyone that has ever flown in an airplane has put their life in the hands of an airline’s assets—including its management and support personnel on the ground, its aircraft, pilots, and crew. Staking your company’s business on a cloud partner requires a similar type of “bet the bank” trust, because you’ve got a lot riding on the decision.

Before pilots take off, they methodically go through a checklist of critical items. It’s not a bad idea to come up with your own list when choosing a cloud partner.

According to Lydia Leong, Research Director for Gartner, Inc., “Every cloud infrastructure service is different. Each has a unique architecture for systems, network and storage, as well as a different pricing model, customer support model, set of self-service portal capabilities and ability to meet your security and compliance needs.”1

If they are all so different, how can we do an apples-to-apples comparison? It may be difficult to create a one-size-fits-all checklist, but we can certainly create one for our specific requirements. We can also compare a few of the main differentiators of these cloud providers. Many experts agree that the following three items should be on your checklist:

1. Verify that the company is strong and successful. Find out who its customers are, what its processes are, and where its management came from.

2. Confirm that the company’s technology DNA matches that of your product. No two cloud providers offer the same technology and all fit into one of three categories: Applications or Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, or Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Your choice has to match the DNA of your product architecture.

3. Validate that its management console matches the skills of your cloud support personnel. As a product matures, it evolves to simplify more complexity. Look for those cloud partners that offer powerful management tools that harness complexity and simplify its management. This will enable a broader spectrum of team members to play a role in managing your application, not just developers.

A thorough investigation of these cloud partner attributes will help ensure your company’s successful ascent to the clouds and a sense of assurance for the customers that fly with you. This article examines these critical pre-flight areas.

The Company

As technology managers, we understand IT and make technology purchase decisions throughout our careers, but we rarely make technology decisions where the failure of our choice may cause the loss of a significant portion of our market share. We’re not just making a run-of-the-mill decision when we choose a cloud partner.

The success of your venture depends on how well the cloud provider manages its business. If they run a slipshod practice, they may not catch enough of the little stuff that can turn into huge headaches for your company.

Find out about the cloud provider’s maintenance processes. Ask them what they do as a regular course of business to ensure that your business is going to keep on running when surprises crop up. The support offerings of a cloud provider may range from “unmanaged infrastructure with no support” to “managed infrastructure with enterprise support.” Don’t settle for a support plan that is something less than you require.

It’s also important to know the support philosophy of your cloud provider. For example, do they feel that they should be proactive about their support by anticipating problems and offering preventative maintenance, or are they more reactive preferring to fix the problem after it occurs?

Another way to investigate a cloud provider is through customer reference checks. You can find out how open and transparent the cloud provider is with its customers. You’ll start to get a feel for this during your own buying process by gauging their response to documentation requests during due diligence and their willingness to share customer experiences via case studies and success metrics.

The Technology Offering

At a high level, it’s important to look at the basic segments of cloud providers and then dig into the specific hardware and software features of each. Cloud providers can be divided into three segments: 1) applications, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), providers; 2) Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers; and 3) Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers.

The SaaS providers offer applications like email, customer relationship management, workforce management, and others. The application has a finite list of functions that it can provide, but these applications offer some amount of configuration to help tailor

them to specific business processes. They cannot be configured to The Cloud Computing Pyramid perform tasks outside of their scope. Application For example, Salesforce.com cannot Niche

be configured to be an accounting Platform system. Infrastructure Breadth

between the infrastructure and the The Cloud Computing Pyramid illustrates the various layers of cloud computing and how they relate to the application. This allows programmers entire spcae. Learn more at http://pyramid.gogrid.com to create scalable applications without the need to worry about the underlying technology environment. This means that development is faster and easier, but not as flexible as it may need to be. For instance, PaaS providers often rely on frameworks such as .NET, Java, or Ruby On Rails.

The final segment is IaaS, where the greatest amount of control is offered on top of completely virtualized IT configurations. However, IaaS may be more difficult to build and manage without strong tools. It is important to look at the software stack that IaaS providers deploy for their virtualized environments. If they use components from other vendors, they may be at the mercy of that vendor’s product roadmap for adding new functionality. The more control an IaaS provider has over their management software, the more flexibility can be enjoyed by their customers.

Once the shortlist is created from cloud providers in a particular segment, you can peel back the layers of each vendor’s technology in order to evaluate their system architecture, network options, storage methods, and security capabilities.

Investigate how the cloud provider assigns infrastructure to its customers. Are their servers shared, dedicated, or both? If shared, how is the cloud provider managing the virtual space? This virtual architecture is usually less expensive than dedicated server models, but make sure it provides the flexibility you need.

On the network side, make sure the cloud provider has enough bandwidth and an IP address scheme that fits your needs. In other words, find out if the provider will allow you to use your corporate IP addresses or force you to adopt their IP address convention.

Also remember that redundancy doesn’t mean “unnecessary”. Look for cloud providers

that offer persistent storage, so that when your application goes down, you don’t lose the data that was contained in those instances. It’s always better to plan for the worst, but expect the best.

Lastly, verify that the cloud provider’s security matches your requirements. See if they use firewall software or hardware, or both. Ask if the cloud provider has anti virus and DDoS options. Verify that they have SAS 70 Type II certification and documented security processes.

The Management Console

As we discussed, each cloud provider has designed their infrastructure with a particular persona in mind. Some are geared toward developers while others will appeal more to IT administrators. Management consoles should also accommodate multiple users with multiple roles, which restrict or grant access to functionality.

Hypervisor software like VMware and Citrix are commonly used by cloud providers to manage virtual environments. On the plus side, they are well-known, but may not be as flexible as open source hypervisor software, such as Xen, which can be modified for new customer requirements. Ask your cloud provider about the virtualization technologies they employ.

It’s also important to see how much of the infrastructure can be controlled via the management console and application programming interfaces (APIs). For example, you should be able to bring servers online, restart, add or delete instances, add storage, and manage load balancing via the management console. You should also be able to invoke other functionality via the APIs. Ask your cloud provider to demonstrate the full range of functionality within their management console and APIs.

Next Steps

With so many attributes, it is easy to understand why cloud offerings are not commodities. Each was built with different uses and users in mind, so finding a match for your requirements is crucial. If you are about to launch a cloud evaluation and you haven’t already done so, you should start by gathering the requirements for your cloud.

Here are some steps to take in your evaluation:

1. Visit the websites of your shortlist vendors. Read their whitepapers, customer stories, and product literature.

2. Set up calls with your shortlist vendors. Not every detail will be covered on their website, so create an agenda of other topics you want to cover and ask them to discuss these items with you.

3. Read industry research. Some analysts do a good job of distilling the issues down to salient points, and you may discover an aspect of cloud computing that is critical to your success.

a. Gartner, Inc. – largest IT research firm – www.gartner.com

b. Forrester Research – www.forrester.com

4. Search media articles. Cloud computing is proceeding at a rapid pace and many pundits are writing about it.

a. Network World – www.networkworld.com

b. InfoWorld – www.infoworld.com

References

1. Leong, Lydia. “How to Select a Cloud Computing Infrastructure Provider.” Gartner, Inc. 20 April 2009