Journey Through the Cloud of Confusion
Every journey taken always includes the path not taken, the detour through hell, the crossroads of indecision and the long way home - Shannon L. Alder
The world is changing faster than ever before, with technology leading the charge into this brave new world. It is changing the way we communicate, work, play and think. It is challenging our cultural norms and our expectations of what we want and when we want it - a world of instant gratification.
In turn, these accelerating socio-economic changes are impacting businesses and how they interact with their customers, requiring them to win their hearts and minds through new interfaces. They can vary from intelligent social media feeds on mobile devices, to reward-based gamified advertising campaigns to demographically targeted participants.
Technology is allowing people to consume and react to information in real-time, requiring businesses to move out of their comfort zone to create innovative strategies. These digital transformation strategies involve rapidly deploying new and updated services to meet this real-time demand and remain competitive.
Technology analysts advise companies the only way to remain competitive, is to start adopting the "Cloud" - But what does that even mean?
"The Journey to the Cloud"
It was almost ten years ago at a technology conference when, to my confusion, I first heard the term "cloud" uttered in a hallway conversation between conference attendees. Only to listen to it again three years later, loud-and-clear, as "The Journey To The Cloud" conference theme and tag-line.
At that time, nobody even knew what that "journey" was, let alone how they were going to get there. Today, the components and terms are now well known. From SaaS to IaaS to PaaS, technologists know their strict definition, but it is still a matter of perspective how and when a customer adopts these technologies.
In this blog, I would like to present the concept of a workable digital transformation framework developed by PiiVOT for this "Journey to the Cloud" and what it looks like at different high-level stages by featuring various components as I see them today.
I see two differing digital transformation viewpoints: Infrastructure and Application-based perspectives.
The Infrastructure Perspective
An Infrastructure-based view of Cloud Adoption is where many of the technology constructs and hardware features that govern on-premise data centre objects are re-designed, optimized and used to build cloud architectures for improved flexibility and provisioning.
The Application Perspective
An Application-based view of Cloud Adoption is predominately one where many of the same traditional data centre technology constructs and hardware features are abstracted further and integrated within the application stack allowing for increased service isolation and portability.
It is not enough to make a blanketed statement to say that an organization will only possess one view or the other - many times separate internal business units will assume differing opinions depending on the units method of service delivery to customers, such as through commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) or custom software development.
It is also not enough to say that organizations should only focus on one viewpoint or the other. My opinion is that the secret is the ability to understand the commonalities and balance between both positions that will allow organizations to adopt a successful cloud strategy.
It is an area that I have endeavoured to bridge for myself and my customers my entire technology career.
Who is Gerry?
Upon graduating University, my focus in IT was in the application space, specifically relational database technology. In the late '90s, I worked with developers at a dot-com start-up company as a DBA to integrate Oracle stored procedural libraries into a custom-built client-server C application to improve the speed of logged web click-through transactions. I became the connection between both infrastructure and application worlds, and for the remainder of my time at this dot-com, I continued to focus on this alignment to ensure we achieved our desired business outcomes.
Since then, I have attempted to maintain this balance between viewpoints to produce successful service delivery solutions. This joint perspective has helped PiiVOT centre on developing a workable framework that focuses on cloud adoption based on the critical components of people, process and technology.
To best understand how this works and where we start our digital transformation journey, we begin by viewing the state of traditional application offerings and the delivery platforms used today.
Traditional Application Delivery Platforms
Before we continue, I want to recognize that today, new start-up organizations have not typically adopted traditional platforms and thus feel that this stage would not necessarily apply to them. While I somewhat agree with that assessment, I would argue that there are still points of consideration that should be noted regardless of the kind of organization you represent.
Generally speaking, most Traditional Platforms represent on-premise siloed hardware infrastructure built with minimal automation and network segmentation between multi-tiered COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) applications on flat networks. Remote sites are inter-linked via expensive, dedicated MPLS connections into security zones buffered by next-generation firewalls. SaaS, IaaS or PaaS cloud consumption is ad-hoc in nature and prioritized based on the decibel level of the request made by any given internal business unit.
Traditional platforms, organically grown, are built on well-intentioned procedures and mitigate business risk, but their inflexibility has handcuffed the business' capacity to innovate.
It is usually in this scenario when executives - in understanding the need to compete in an on-demand world - impose "cloud-first" initiatives, leaving the details of low-risk execution and operations to the IT directors and managers. This scenario also represents the point where the need for digital transformation is highest, and value of the PiiVOT Platform Adoption Framework is most critical, yet it is the most difficult for business leaders to recognize.
Efficient Service Delivery Platforms
Efficient Platforms align with an infrastructure-based view presented earlier and represent the consumption of cloud IaaS infrastructure through the creation of security groups which provide layer-three access control to cloud resources and COTS applications. Simplified automation software such as Red Hat Ansible, provide automatic provisioning of these and other PaaS resources such as databases, web servers and auto-scaling elastic load balancers.
Applications are migrated based on their acceptable thresholds for quality-of-experience and compliance, and as new applications and services are adopted and developed, they are deployed and automated into these various cloud platforms.
Many traditional organizations stop their digital transformation journey here, using this as their final milestone as evidence to the business that they have fully executed on the "cloud-first" initiative. However, it is not the full story.
Why PiiVOT's Platform Adoption Framework?
These technology capabilities are not necessarily innovative by themselves but when combined with organizational aligned processes, invested stakeholders and reformed job roles; the Cloud fulfils the promise of a powerful, flexible tool to deliver services. Not embracing these added facets has, in my experience, lead to many failed cloud initiatives with much finger-pointing.
These missing components were the main reason why PiiVOT created a Platform Adoption Framework based on evaluating an organization's People, Process and Technology maturity. Based on this evaluation, PiiVOT provides a "recipe book" for the creation of a secure, low-risk foundation of capabilities which fosters digital transformation initiatives and allows for the adoption of not just Cloud, but ANY service delivery platform. (A more in-depth dive of the Framework will be a topic for a future blog)
Once a full people, process and technology framework is adopted, the platform can be extended back to on-premise environments through the construction of a green-field software-defined stack of infrastructure based on the secure, low-risk foundation of capabilities as outlined in the PiiVOT Platform Adoption Framework.
The True Promise of Hybrid Cloud
This green-field infrastructure would start small, built on converged, hyper-converged (Nutanix) or open-converged (Datrium) technology and scaled as applications identified as "cloud candidates" are migrated from on-premise brown-field environments to either the new on-premise service delivery platform or re-purchased as SaaS or are retired entirely.
Inexpensive link aggregation SD-WAN technology would replace costly MPLS networks as the de facto connectivity standard for IaaS/PaaS and ROBO (Remote Office/Branch Office) sites, linking Cloud with on-premise platforms.
Or in other words, to finally fulfil the promise of the Hybrid Cloud.
We could stop here and report back to the business of our success - that we had completed our digital transformation journey - but to honestly take advantage of what the Cloud represents, we need to take things just one step further.
Agile Service Delivery Platforms
Agile Platforms represents the ability to deliver services through third-platform software development. The third-platform, as defined by IDC, is the inter-dependency of mobile, social, information and Cloud computing to produce a flexible way to deliver services. The concept is to further abstract away from constructs such as virtual machines and towards Docker containerized application-based environments. These Docker containers use what is called a micro-services architecture, meaning they are written to handle small specific functions complete with required data integrity and security code which interface with other containers through a standard API framework. (ie. User Authentication or a User Search function)
In many use cases, functions are not written from scratch but use open-source code from tested repositories submitted by either the broader open-source community or via strategic COTS vendors who wish to maintain relevance in this brave new world of agile service delivery.
The power of Ansible + Kubernetes
The next layer above is the management software, such as Kubernetes, which allows for the scheduling, automation and orchestration of a logically abstracted group of containers in a cluster. In the Kubernetes world, these logical abstractions are called pods and have dependencies on each other depending on how they are defined to form more substantial services. (Full disclosure, there are many different cluster management products for containers out there, such as Docker Swarm and Mesosphere w/ Marathon)
The real power of software like Kubernetes lay in their ability to automate, orchestrate, replicate, and federate (wow, that is some awesome alliteration) between clusters, which means that the syncing of pod resources to different Kubernetes clusters in a different geographic region can be created to include federated integration to allow for failover to that region if the current site fails!
Now, if we go back and look at the infrastructure, containers operate within VMs (or physical hosts, if you want) and are automatically provisioned through prior developed Ansible scripts which quite nicely balances both infrastructure and application views presented earlier. An added benefit is that Ansible has direct integration with Kubernetes and most other container cluster management software.
The Digital Transformation Holy Grail
As a result, an entire service can be written, orchestrated, automated, and provisioned with geographic failover capability rapidly all within the same operating ecosystem for complete application portability regardless of the service platform.
I will let you re-read that last paragraph and let it sink in.
While this ability is excellent, Kubernetes and many of its brethren, do not have inherent operational features such as monitoring of services, or secure access to its resources. These lack of features is where a product like Red Hat's OpenShift comes in; it is an operational management layer which provides monitoring and security of resources but also offers the ability to perform rolling upgrades and deployments of an entire Kubernetes cluster to minimize or eliminate the downtime of services.
This complete functional platform is, what I call, the digital transformation Holy Grail and becomes easy to see why it is taking off. It is the REAL reason why Cloud has become so essential to the future realization of agile business services.
What if I mostly have Commercial Off-the-Shelf Software?
It is at this point, folks will correctly point out that in many organizations, custom software development is not the primary way services are delivered to customers, but through inflexible COTS applications and platforms. How do businesses that have a significant landscape of COTS products leverage the power of an open environment like this?
An excellent question and the answer is that it depends on the kind of COTS software you have. As mentioned before, many COTS vendors are recognizing the power of the third-platform and are either re-developing their application to use containers or are building in rich API environments so they can integrate with containers and their cluster management software.
It is going to be imperative that IT departments, Enterprise Architects and application owners create strict criteria when selecting future COTS vendors that understand this demand and are building their software to integrate. (Another perfect topic for a next blog!)
In Summary
To honestly take full advantage of the Cloud, organizations are going to need to commit to a digital transformation adoption strategy that involves a balanced method of understanding both infrastructure and application perspectives. This approach also requires the evaluation and resolution of People, Process and Technology aspects of the business; experience has shown us that focusing only on technology, usually leads to failed cloud initiatives.
While many other competitors have successful cloud adoption and migration methodologies, PiiVOT has developed a practical platform adoption framework for groups that possess the level of commitment to see a full strategy through.