Cloud Management

Several providers have products designed for cloud computing management (VMware, OpenQRM, CloudKick, and Managed Methods), along with the big players like BMC, HP, IBM Tivoli and CA. Each uses a variety of methods to warn of impending problems or send up the red flag when a sudden problem occurs. Each also tracks performance trends.

While they all have features that differentiate them from each other, they're also focused on one key concept: providing information about cloud computing systems. If your needs run into provisioning, the choices become more distinct than choosing "agent vs. agentless" or "SNMP vs. WBEM."

The main cloud infrastructure management products offer similar core features:

• Most support different cloud types (often referred to as hybrid clouds).
• Most support the on-the-fly creation and provisioning of new objects and the destruction of unnecessary objects, like servers, storage, and/or apps.
• Most provide the usual suite of reports on status (uptime, response time, quota use, etc.) and have a dashboard that can be drilled into.

When it comes to meeting those three criteria, there are a few vendors that offer pervasive approaches in handling provisioning and managing metrics in hybrid environments: RightScale, Kaavo, Zeus, Scalr and Morph. There are also options offered by cloud vendors themselves that meet the second and third criteria, such as CloudWatch from Amazon Web Services.

The large companies known for their traditional data center monitoring applications have been slow to hit the cloud market, and what products they do have are rehashes of existing applications that do little in the way of providing more than reporting and alerting tools. CA is on an acquisition spree to fix this and just acquired 3Tera, a cloud provisioning player.

An example of the confusion in the industry is IBM's Tivoli product page for cloud computing. You'll notice that clicking the Getting Started tab results in a 404 error. Nice work, IBM.

Meanwhile, HP's OpenView (now called Operations Manager) can manage cloud-based servers, but only insofar as it can manage any other server. BMC is working on a cloud management tool, but doesn't have anything beyond its normal products out at the moment.

In place of these behemoths, secondary players making splashes on the market are offering monitoring-focused applications from companies like Scout, UpTime Systems, Cloudkick, NetIQ and ScienceLogic. There is also the "app formerly known as" Hyperic, now owned by VMware through the acquisition of SpringSource.

In truth, we could rival John Steinbeck and Robert Jordan in word count when it comes to writing about all the products in this field, though within a year or two it should be a much smaller space as acquisitions occur, companies fail and the market sorts itself out. There's a lot on the way in cloud computing, not the least of which is specifications. Right now the cloud is the Wild West: vast, underpopulated, and lacking order except for a few spots of light.

These are the best infrastructure management and provisioning options available today:

RightScale
RightScale is the big boy on the block right now. Like many vendors in the nascent market, they offer a free edition with limitations on features and capacity, designed to introduce you to the product (and maybe get you hooked, ala K.C. Gillette's famous business model at the turn of the 20th century). RightScale's product is broken down into four components:

• Cloud Management Environment
• Cloud-Ready ServerTemplate and Best Practice Deployment Library
• Adaptable Automation Engine
• Multi-Cloud Engine

A fifth feature states that the "Readily Extensible Platform supports programmatic access to the functionality of the RightScale Platform." In looking at the product, these features aren't really separate from one another, but make a nice, integrated offering.

RightScale's management environment is the main interface users will have with the software. It is designed to walk a user through the initial process of migrating to the cloud using their templates and library. The management environment is then used for (surprise!) managing that environment, namely continuing builds and ensuring resource availability. This is where the automation engine comes into play: being able to quickly provision and put into operation additional capacity, or remove that excess capacity, as needed. Lastly, there is the Multi-Cloud Engine, supporting Amazon, GoGrid, Eucalyptus and Rackspace.

RightScale is also working on supporting the Chef open-source systems integration specifications, as well. Chef is designed from the ground up for the cloud.

Kaavo
Kaavo plays in a very similar space to RightScale. The product is typically used for:

• Single-click deployment of complex multi-tier applications in the cloud (Dev, QA, Prod)
• Handling demand bursts/variations by automatically adding/removing resources
• Run-time management of application infrastructure in the cloud
• Encryption of persisted data in the cloud
• Automation of workflows to handle run-time production exceptions without human intervention

The core of Kaavo's product is called IMOD. IMOD handles configuration, provisioning and changes (adjustments in their terminology) to the cloud environment, and across multiple vendors in a hybrid model. Like all major CIM players, Kaavo's IMOD sits at the "top" of the stack, managing the infrastructure and application layers.

One great feature in IMOD is its multi-cloud, single system tool. For instance, you can create a database backend in Rackspace while putting your presentation servers on Amazon. Supporting Amazon and Rackspace in the public space and Eucalyptus in the private space is a strong selling point, though it should be noted that most cloud management can support Eucalyptus if it can also support Amazon, as Eucalyptus mimics Amazon EC2 very closely.

Both Kaavo and RightScale offer scheduled "ramp-ups" or "ramp-downs" (dynamic allocation based on demand) and monitoring tools to ensure that information and internal metrics (like SLAs) are transparently available. The dynamic allocation even helps meet the demands of those SLAs. Both offer the ability to keep templates as well to ease the deployment of multi-tier systems.

Zeus
Zeus was famous for its rock-solid Web server, one that didn't have a lot of market share but did have a lot of fanatical fans and top-tier customers. With Apache, and to a lesser-extent, IIS, dominating that market, not to mention the glut of load balancers out there, Zeus took its expertise in the application server space and came up with the Application Delivery Controller piece of the Zeus Traffic Controller. It uses traditional load balancing tools to test availability and then spontaneously generate or destroy additional instances in the cloud, providing on-the-fly provisioning. Zeus currently supports this on the Rackspace and, to a lesser extent, Amazon platforms.

Scalr
Scalr is a young project hosted on Google Code and Scalr.net that creates dynamic clusters, similar to Kaavo and RightScale, on the Amazon platform. It supports triggered upsizing and downsizing based on traffic demands, snapshots (which can be shared, incidentally, a very cool feature), and the custom building of images for each server or server-type, also similar to RightScale. Being a new release, Scalr does not support the wide number of platforms, operating systems, applications, and databases that the largest competitors do, sticking to the traditional expanded-LAMP architecture (LAMP plus Ruby, Tomcat, etc.) that comprises many content systems.

Morph
While not a true management platform, the MSP-minded Morph products offers similar functionality in its own private space. Morph CloudServer is a newer product on the market, filling the management and provisioning space as an appliance. It is aimed at the enterprise seeking to deploy a private cloud. Its top-tier product, the Morph CloudServer is based on the IBM BladeCenter, and supports hundreds of virtual machines.

Under the core is an Ubuntu Linux operating system and the Eucalyptus cloud computing platform. Aimed at the managed service provider market, Morph allows for the creation of private clouds and the dynamic provisioning within those closed clouds. While still up-and-coming, Morph has made quite a splash and bears watching, particularly because of its open-source roots and participation in open-cloud organizations.

CloudWatch
Amazon's CloudWatch works on Amazon's platform only, which limits its overall usefulness as it cannot be a hybrid cloud management tool. Since Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the biggest platform out there (though Rackspace claims it is closing that gap quickly), it still bears mentioning.

CloudWatch for EC2 supports dynamic provisioning (called auto-scaling), monitoring, and load-balancing, all managed through a central management console -- the same central management console used by Amazon Web Services. Its biggest advantage is that it requires no additional software to install and no additional website to access applications through. While the product is clearly not for enterprises that need hybrid support, those that exclusively use Amazon should know that it is as robust and functional as the other market players.

Emerging Standards

Cloud standards have eveolved but are different from U.S. and European standards organizations and includes the Open Data Center Alliance, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), standards consortium OMG, storage and networking standards group SNIA, and the European telecommunications and network standards group, ETSI.

All of the organizations are doing their own work with end users and vendors to establish cloud standards, which are then discussed among the organizations.

Cloud Management Standards by DMTF

DMTF is working to Address Management Interoperability for Cloud Systems

Technologies like cloud computing and virtualization are rapidly being adopted by enterprise IT managers to better deliver services to their customers, lower IT costs and improve operational efficiencies.

DMTF's Cloud Management Initiative is focused on developing interoperable cloud infrastructure management standards and promoting adoption of those standards in the industry. The work of DMTF working groups promoted by the Cloud Management Initiative is focused on achieving interoperable cloud infrastructure management between cloud service providers and their consumers and developers.
Cloud Working Groups

DMTF’s Cloud Management Initiative is promoting the work of the Cloud Management Work Group, the Cloud Auditing Data Federation Working Group, the System Virtualization, Partitioning, Clustering Working Group and the Software Entitlement Working Group. Click on the links below to see an overview of each work group’s activities, work group charter, specifications, work-in-progress specifications and other technical documents.

• Cloud Management Working Group
• Cloud Auditing Data Federation Working Group
• Software Entitlement Working Group
• System Virtualization, Partitioning, and Clustering Working Group