SANTA MONICA, Calif. – February 13, 2012 – ServiceMesh, provider of the market-leading enterprise cloud platform for Global 2000 companies, today announced that it has named Steve Henning vice president of marketing. Bringing more than 25 years of global enterprise software experience to ServiceMesh, Henning will be responsible for all aspects of corporate brand development, go-to-market strategy, and demand generation.

“ServiceMesh is playing a critical role in the global transition to more agile, cloud-based IT operating models,” said Eric Pulier, CEO of ServiceMesh.  “To extend our market reach, we need to grow a dynamic marketing organization that is smart, agile, seasoned, and global in scale. Steve offers an unparalleled level of knowledge in marketing strategy, global market development, branding, customer segmentation, and product marketing, making him the perfect individual to drive our global marketing initiatives.”

Prior to ServiceMesh, Mr. Henning led product strategy and marketing for VMware’s Application Management offerings after the acquisition of performance analytics vendor, Integrien. At Integrien, as the vice president of sales and marketing, he led all revenue generation and marketing activity for the company and successfully managed a highly successful OEM relationship with EMC. Prior to Integrien, Henning was responsible for directing all product management, product marketing, sales enablement and evangelism for IBM Tivoli’s $300 million Integrated Identity Management portfolio. Before that, he served as senior director of product management at Access360, where he helped make the company’s user provisioning product the market leader, key to the acquisition by IBM. Henning also held executive positions at netHESIVE, Inc.; Sserdda, Inc.; Blue Lobster Software; and Continuus Software Corporation. Henning received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

“What attracted me to ServiceMesh is the approach taken with the Agility Platform, allowing organizations to deploy and manage complex, multi-tier application topologies in hybrid cloud environments under a unified, policy-driven SLA, governance and compliance framework. I believe this approach is essential for widespread adoption of the cloud by larger organizations so they can achieve its promise of IT and business agility,” said Henning. “The company is poised for tremendous growth and market domination. ServiceMesh has an exciting future ahead and I look forward to being a part of it.”

Resources:

• Join the enterprise cloud platform discussion on the ServiceMesh blog
• Learn more about the ServiceMesh Agility Platform
• Follow @servicemesh on Twitter
• Watch a 3-minute ServiceMesh demo
• Contact ServiceMesh to learn more

About ServiceMesh

ServiceMesh provides the industry’s leading enterprise cloud platform that enables Global 2000 clients to compress the time-to-delivery of enterprise business applications while governing and securing those applications and data across internal and external clouds. ServiceMesh also delivers professional advisory services and market-ready solution accelerators for common cloud usage scenarios.

Enterprise customers select ServiceMesh to design and implement IT strategies that offer game changing competitive advantages through a federation of internal and external IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and cloud service providers. Customers use the Agility Platform to automate their plan, build, share, and run lifecycle with the security, governance, transparency, identity management, and policy control required by large enterprises. Some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care, and other IT-intensive industries rely on ServiceMesh to realize quantum improvements in business agility, lower operating costs, and enable new business and economic models that support their strategic business initiatives. To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com.

Media Contact:

Elyce Ventura
Eastwick
408-470-4870
servicemesh@eastwick.com

WHAT:

ServiceMesh, provider of market-leading enterprise cloud platforms for Global 2000 companies, will present enterprise cloud best practices and moderate the Private Cloud track at Cloud Connect 2012, February 13-16, at the Santa Clara Convention Center.   ServiceMesh representatives will be available at booth #422 to deliver live demonstrations of the ServiceMesh Agility Platform, the industry’s most comprehensive policy-based governance, security and lifecycle management solution to unlock the business value of cloud computing by dramatically reducing the costs, risks, and time-to-market for delivery of IT services.

ServiceMesh vice president of strategy Dave Roberts will present a session titled “Applications at Scale.” This presentation will discuss key methods and technologies necessary to support today’s massively scalable applications in cloud environments. Mr. Roberts is also the moderator and track chair for the Private Cloud Track, which focuses on hybrid and private cloud architectures and their impact on infrastructure, network, and storage decisions.

Kyle Falkenhagen, product manager at ServiceMesh, will provide a live demonstration of ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform at the Demo Theater on the exhibition floor. This product tour will include an overview of enterprise-proven capabilities spanning cloud governance, SLA management, lifecycle management, security, and cloud portability to enable complex applications to be deployed on-demand across different private and public clouds.

WHY:

Enterprise IT needs to transform from their current reactive and constrained IT services delivery approach to more agile and cost effective operating models that align quickly to business needs. However, many companies trying to develop a cloud strategy fail to consider the full impact of the cloud on their IT operating model and business unit end-users, and they struggle to overcome a variety of organizational and technical challenges. ServiceMesh has helped some of the world’s largest enterprises implement cloud strategies that successfully navigate these challenges and achieve a more agile IT operating model complete with policy management, consistent governance, end-to-end security, and workflow automation.

WHEN / WHERE:

Cloud Connect 2012
February 13-16, 2012
Santa Clara Convention Center
5001 Great America Parkway
Santa Clara, Calif. 95054

Dave Roberts
“Applications at Scale”
Feb. 16, 2012
10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
Grand Ballroom G

Kyle Falkenhagen
“ServiceMesh Agility Platform Demo – Sponsored by ServiceMesh”
Feb. 14, 2012
4:45 p.m. – 5:05 p.m.
Demo Theater on the exhibition floor

Resources:

• Join the enterprise cloud platform discussion on the ServiceMesh blog
• Learn more about the ServiceMesh Agility Platform
• Follow @servicemesh on Twitter
• Watch a 3-minute ServiceMesh demo
• Contact ServiceMesh to learn more

About ServiceMesh

ServiceMesh provides the industry’s only enterprise cloud platform that enables Agile IT operating models for Global 2000 clients. ServiceMesh solutions consist of advisory services, market-ready IT optimization strategies, and the ServiceMesh Agility Platform™ to automate and manage the lifecycle of cloud-based, “everything-as-a-service” environments.

Enterprise customers select ServiceMesh to design and implement IT strategies that offer game changing competitive advantages through a federation of internal and external IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and cloud service providers. Customers use the Agility Platform to automate their plan, build, share, and run lifecycle with the security, governance, transparency, identity management, and policy control required by large enterprises. Some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care, and other IT-intensive industries rely on ServiceMesh to realize quantum improvements in business agility, lower operating costs, and to enable new business and economic models that support their strategic business initiatives. To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com.

Contact:

Elyce Ventura
Eastwick
408-470-4870
servicemesh@eastwick.com

(I should probably note that I covered some of these ideas last year in my post titled “Internal Cloud vs. Virtualization: What’s the Diff?” You would do well to go back and read that material as well.)

The most important thing to keep in mind is that virtualization is primarily a description of technology. In particular, hypervisors are small software shims that slip between the physical machine hardware and a guest operating system and give the guest the illusion that it is running directly on the hardware. This allows the hypervisor to create this illusion for multiple guests at the same time, allowing multiple virtual machines to share the same physical hardware. Many IaaS clouds use virtualization. Certainly, all the major IaaS public clouds — AWS, Terremark, Rackspace, Fujitsu, Savvis, etc. — as well as most IaaS private clouds.

So, doesn’t that suggest that IaaS clouds and virtualization are inseparable? The answer is no, in the same way that finding a bunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in an elementary school cafeteria at noon doesn’t imply that peanut butter isn’t tasty by itself (Thai chicken satay, anybody?).

The fundamental difference is that while “virtualization” describes a technology used to allow different virtual instances to share a common piece of hardware, “cloud” really describes an operating model for IT. So the next logical question is, “What’s an operating model?”

An operating model describes how an enterprise functions across process, operations, and technology domains in order to deliver business value. How do those things interact to create a desirable outcome? A cloud operating model is one focused on using clouds, as-a-service delivery, and agile IT to enable efficient IT utilization as the foundation for increased business value. At ServiceMesh we sometimes call this an “agile IT operating model” to indicate that it’s really about more than clouds, as well, but that’s another post altogether. Whether we call it a cloud operating model or an agile IT operating model, it’s important to note that an operating model can utilize a lot of different underlying technology for its implementation — it’s a completely generic notion at a top level.

Users of a cloud operating model access resources through self-service interfaces. They request resources with certain characteristics (amount of CPU, RAM, and disk space, for instance), and they receive access some time later (hopefully in less than a minute or two). But when they access those resources they don’t have any expectation of which exact physical machine they are using. From a user point of view, there is no way to tell (not totally true) that a given “server” they have requested is backed by a virtual machine or a physical machine. For all the user knows, the server might be a physical server in a huge server farm or it might be an “equivalent” virtual machine being run alongside others on a larger physical machine. At ServiceMesh, we call a cloud that uses physical systems without hypervisors a “bare metal cloud.”

“But, but…” I hear you cry, “Without a hypervisor don’t you lose a lot of manageability?” The answer is yes. But that’s not an argument for why clouds and virtualization are inseparable. You’re merely observing that some cloud implementations are more manageable than others. Virtualization brings many benefits, such as the ability to transparently shift workloads to different hardware within the cloud in a transparent fashion, for load balancing and disaster recovery (think of the live migration technologies supported by the various hypervisors).

But bare metal clouds also have interesting properties such as increased performance. If you want every CPU cycle your cloud can deliver (think large data analytics workloads), you might want to ditch the hypervisor and run your application directly on the metal. You can still manage your physical servers as a pooled resource within a cloud operating model, offering self-service access with accounting and charge-back of resource usage.

Interestingly, if you use an advanced cloud platform like Agility Platform, you can have multiple clouds of each type, virtualized or non-virtualized, running side-by-side, and you move applications and workloads from one to another. You might want to do this, for instance, to allow software development to occur in a lower-cost cloud using virtualization. That saves cost when you don’t really need performance. Then, when development and testing is completely, you can move the final workloads into production on a bare metal cloud. The only difference in user experience is the performance and cost.

So, while the cloud and virtualization combo is certainly as popular as peanut butter and jelly, don’t mistake popularity for inseparability. “Virtualization” describes one cloud implementation technology choice. “Cloud” describes an overall operating model. For many, bare metal clouds that eschew performance-stealing hypervisors are an interesting choice for some percentage of the cloud landscape.

Are you using or interested in bare metal clouds or do you see no value in them whatsoever? Weigh in with a comment and let us know.

(Image courtesy of Shawn Carpenter.)

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

— Robert Frost, 1915

Robert Frost was a great poet. But he would have made a horrible IT strategist.

Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” is one of the most famous in the English-speaking world. In it, Frost writes as a traveler momentarily stopped at a fork in the road, trying to determine which path to take. Frost peers first down one path and then the other. In the final lines of the poem, Frost says, “I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” While there is a tremendous life-lesson in avoiding the herd and choosing the unknown adventure of a road less traveled, it’s horribly inefficient.

Engineers and process designers throughout the ages have understood the duality of Frost’s fork in the road. In most processing systems, there are two ways to do things: the fast way and the slow way. The fast way is often termed the “fast path” or the “happy path.” The slow way is frequently called the “slow path” or the “exception path.” When processing starts, a few checks are made to determine whether the processing can be done on the fast path or not. If the checks pass, the processing moves along at light speed. But if those checks fail, typically because they detect a condition requiring more complex processing, then the processing must be done on the more laborious exception path.

This “fast path vs. exception path” pattern repeats itself all over the place in technology and business processes. In software, the fast path is the error-free code path. In data networking, the fast path is that case where data flows are already identified, the incoming packet is the next in sequence, and the packet is not fragmented and does not contain any unusual options. In IT processes, the fast path is the pre-approved path. In banking, the fast path is the case where trade information matches and reconciliation can occur, allowing so-called “straight through processing.” While the road less traveled may have made all the difference for Frost, the rest of the world definitely wants to keep moving along the fast path, not the exception path.

The same thing applies to cloud computing and agile IT. When we’re working to implement cloud computing, we need to think beyond the technology and gain some understanding of the processes that are going to surround it. Are the processes we are designing optimized to keep most of the processing on the fast path, or are we setting ourselves up to push most of the processing to the exception path? If we aren’t careful, we can virtually eliminate the gains in cost and agility that we’re seeking to achieve by moving to cloud computing in the first place.

For instance, ServiceMesh was recently asked to respond to an RFP from a major corporation looking to implement self-service access to public and private cloud resources. As we read through the RFP, we kept seeing references to “approval workflows.” The customer wanted to make sure that the Agility Platform could stop at various points in its automation sequences and kick off an approval process. We called the customer and asked for clarification.

“Yes, the Agility Platform can do everything you’re asking for,” we told them. “But the question is, do you really want to do things that way? You realize that by inserting too many approvals into these simple activities that you’re going to slow your cloud operating model down to a crawl, right? Things are going to go slowly and you’re artificially driving up your costs by having everybody process all these approvals.”

“Yes,” the customer replied. “We know that.” You could hear the sigh at the other end of the phone. “Unfortunately, we’re being forced by our management to implement these workflows. Can you suggest something better?”

“Well, the best way to design this is to use the policy management system to pre-approve access and ensure that standard workflows stay on the ‘fast path’ as much as possible. That way, things are fully automated and move along quickly. People don’t need to generate useless approval requests for standard, pre-approved resources.”

The client agreed, but because of stodgy, corporate requirements that had been designed for a bygone era, they persisted in forcing their “self-service” system to move along the slow path. Typically, these requirements are enacted to ensure good corporate IT governance or IT risk management practices are followed. Without some sort of “review,” the thinking goes, there would be chaos and costly mistakes could happen.

The reality is, by keeping all the processing on the slow path, response times for access to new IT resources are very slow. Further, the slow path processing (humans) are overburdened with routine approvals. Because the approvals are so routine and almost never generate an interesting problem, the people doing the processing begin to approve the requests by rote, thereby desensitizing themselves to the actual IT governance and risk issues that might be present. Mistakes actually increase in spite of the perceived greater scrutiny of the approvals process. This is very similar to the effect seen in software systems that ask, “Do you really want to do X?” every time you perform an action. People stop reading the messages and hit “Yes” out of habit, leading to a mistake the one time the really didn’t want to do that.

The right answer is to move routine access to IT resource to a truly self-service IT “fast path,” saving the heavyweight approval process for non-standard requests that really need it. In order to do this you’ll need to determine firm-wide governance policies enforced by a sophisticated enterprise cloud platform, such as ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform, the enterprise IT department can deliver the optimal balance of speed, agility, IT governance and risk management. If your cloud platform doesn’t have these features, you need a new cloud platform.

So, remember that while the “Road Not Taken” makes for a great poem, it’s a really poor way to run your cloud. Instead, design your cloud operating model to leverage the power of self-service access. Use an advanced policy management system to determine which requests are routine and can be handled in a pre-approved fashion on the fast path and which need to be handled on the exception path. If the situation doesn’t conform to the fast-path policies, process the request with human intervention. But after that, try to figure out whether the request was truly exceptional or could be reclassified as routine and pushed back onto the fast path. If so, update your policies and shift the processing accordingly. Your cloud will run faster, your costs will decrease, and your users will be happier because they’ll be able to accomplish more work, more quickly.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – January 26, 2012 – ServiceMesh, provider of the market-leading enterprise cloud platform for Global 2000 companies, today announced support for Fujitsu’s Global Cloud Platform, giving ServiceMesh customers access to Fujitsu’s global, on-demand cloud computing footprint. The new capabilities enable ServiceMesh customers to leverage Fujitsu’s Global Cloud as part of their hybrid cloud strategies to reduce the cost and time-to-market for delivery of enterprise IT services. Enterprises use ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform to provide cloud governance, policy management, security, and workflow automation in hybrid environments spanning multiple internal and external clouds using a single management interface. The Agility Platform now provides business users with fully governed, self-service access to Fujitsu’s Global Cloud resources, while giving enterprise managers the confidence that appropriate policy controls will be enforced across all cloud workloads regardless of the target deployment environment.

“The Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform provides fully configurable, on-demand IT infrastructure delivered via our global network of data centers — in Japan, Australia, the USA, Germany, the UK and Singapore — to provide cost-effective yet reliable and secure access to Infrastructure-as-a-Service,” said Cameron McNaught, Senior Vice President Cloud, Fujitsu Global Business Group. “We are delighted at the ServiceMesh announcement, which gives enterprise customers an easy way to build and deploy applications across our global network of cloud platforms, enabling them to meet local data residency and compliance requirements.”

Fujitsu is a global leader in IT systems and services, and one of the three largest IT services providers in the world. The Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform is delivered through Fujitsu data centers located around the world to provide reliable, highly-secure, low latency Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities designed to meet demanding enterprise requirements.

The ServiceMesh Agility Platform helps enterprise customers transition to a more agile IT operating model by empowering business units with self-service provisioning and management of standardized and fully governed IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings to improve business agility and lower operating costs. The Agility Platform enables companies to govern and manage the lifecycle and delivery of these services across hybrid cloud architectures, including internal and external, private and public clouds. The integration of Fujitsu’s Global Cloud Platform provides ServiceMesh customers with additional cloud deployment options to better optimize global workload placement, and enables existing Fujitsu customers to readily leverage the industry’s market leading enterprise cloud platform to govern and manage their cloud workloads.

“Enterprise customers need the flexibility to access high-performance and cost effective cloud-based IT resources around the world,” said Dave Roberts, vice president of strategy at ServiceMesh. “Fujitsu’s Global Cloud provides an impressive footprint of global IT resources, while ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform delivers the unified governance, lifecycle management, and automation required by enterprises to effectively manage their hybrid cloud environments. The combination of ServiceMesh and Fujitsu represents a potent new weapon in the enterprise IT arsenal.”

About ServiceMesh

ServiceMesh provides the industry’s leading enterprise cloud platform that enables Global 2000 clients to compress the time-to‐delivery of enterprise business applications while governing and securing those applications and data across internal and external clouds. ServiceMesh also delivers professional advisory services and market‐ready solution accelerators for common cloud usage scenarios.

Enterprise customers select ServiceMesh to design and implement IT strategies that offer game changing competitive advantages through a federation of internal and external IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and cloud service providers. Customers use the Agility Platform to automate their plan, build, share, and run lifecycle with the security, governance, transparency, identity management, and policy control required by large enterprises. Some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care, and other IT‐intensive industries rely on ServiceMesh to realize quantum improvements in business agility, lower operating costs, and enable new business and economic models that support their strategic business initiatives. To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com.

Contact:
Elyce Ventura
Eastwick
408-470-4870
servicemesh@eastwick.com

This year, I was asked to chair the Private Clouds track at Cloud Connect. Over the past couple weeks, I have been working to nail down all the last little details and get everything headed in the right direction before the event arrives in mid-February. The track is looking really nice, and we’re doing our best to serve up some sizzling private cloud goodness to all the attendees.

In spite of the broad enterprise interest in private clouds, I still see attempts by some in the “cloud industry” to discredit private clouds as a concept. Over the past year, I have heard private clouds described as “faux clouds,” “BS,” “vapor,” “nothing but plain old IT,” and other generally pejorative names. Interesting, the sniping mostly seems to be coming from folks with a vested interesting public clouds. I have yet to see a private cloud proponent suggest that public clouds are somehow illegitimate.

To be sure, however, there is criticism of public clouds. Last week, for instance, I read through Bart Copeland’s blog post titled “Don’t Step in the FUD: The Real World Demands Private Cloud.” Bart is the CEO of ActiveState, which has developed a private PaaS product called Stackato, based on Cloud Foundry. In his post, Bart defends private clouds from the criticism of public cloud proponents. He makes the fundamental point that it really doesn’t matter what cloud pundits think, enterprises themselves are making the decision that private clouds have merit and they are building them.

At ServiceMesh, we deal with these same enterprise customers and our experience supports Bart’s conclusion. EVERY enterprise customer that ServiceMesh is working with is building a private cloud of one type or another. To put it another way, reality trumps theory every time.

Now, having established the fact that private clouds are real, a much more interesting question is what are the forces driving enterprises toward them? I think there are a few reasons why enterprises want private clouds:

1. Private clouds build on established virtualization environments and present a more incremental adoption to cloud computing. If you’re an enterprise with an investment in virtualization, you can leverage that knowledge to build your private cloud. There is risk reduction there, though that is frequently more of a perception than a reality.
2. Private clouds are perceived to sidestep some of the broad security concerns associated with public clouds. Again, in the limit, I think this is more of a perception than a reality, but enterprises want to hold onto the security reins right now, at least until they gain some cloud experience and feel more comfortable about a handover.
3. Private clouds can provide more controlled application performance. Many public clouds offer few, if any, performance guarantees beyond simple best-effort. If you’re unhappy with your AWS performance, for instance, you’re free to buy a bigger instance or more instances, but in no case can you call and complain that your SLA is not being met. With private clouds, at least you can yell at your own engineers.
4. Private PaaS delivers portability and side-steps lock-in concerns. I don’t know too many enterprises that are considering public PaaS only right now. The perception is that public PaaS could result in lock-in and limit future enterprise flexibility. I think this is some of the hesitancy that Microsoft is experiencing with Azure, for instance. In contrast, enterprises view hybrid PaaS, with both public and private execution venues as the best of all worlds, providing both a scalable provider-based option with reduced lock-in. I think that’s the reason we see such considerable enterprise interest in Cloud Foundry, for instance. The only public PaaS that seems to diverge from this trend is Force.com. If enterprises have committed to Salesforce.com, then it’s far more likely that they will feel comfortable with the possible lock-in of Force.com.
5. Private clouds provide a target for workloads with strong governance requirements. If your enterprise does business in a regulated market (e.g., banking, insurance, healthcare, pharma, etc.), then you might not have a choice on where certain workloads run. Your regulators and auditors may force you to run things internally. If that’s the case, then the only question is whether you want to run those restricted workloads in a traditional private IT environment (physical or virtualized), or whether you want to build something that operates as a private cloud.

Finally, I should point out that while every enterprise we’re talking to at ServiceMesh is building a private cloud, they are also all committed to public clouds. For some, that’s a phase 2 step. For others, they are going hybrid right from the get-go. And that’s why the controversy between proponents of public and private clouds is so senseless. It isn’t a question of public vs. private clouds. The market is speaking and it’s saying “both.”

Fundamentally, TOSCA is trying to address a very large, complex problem. The TOSCA web site says:

The OASIS TOSCA TC works to enhance the portability of cloud applications and services. TOSCA will enable the interoperable description of application and infrastructure cloud services, the relationships between parts of the service, and the operational behavior of these services (e.g., deploy, patch, shutdown)–independent of the supplier creating the service, and any particular cloud provider or hosting technology. TOSCA will also make it possible for higher-level operational behavior to be associated with cloud infrastructure management.

By increasing service and application portability in a vendor-neutral ecosystem, TOSCA will enable:

• Portable deployment to any compliant cloud
• Smoother migration of existing applications to the cloud
• Flexible bursting (consumer choice)
• Dynamic, multi-cloud provider applications

That goal is so large, that I think it’s probably unbounded. When problems get unbounded, the best you can ever hope to achieve is to solve a large enough subset of the problem that the solution is still interesting. If you can’t achieve that, people ignore the solution because it fundamentally doesn’t help them. There is always an “interesting” part of the problem space that they have to solve a different way, and that undercuts the use of the partial “solution.”

Can TOSCA identify a large enough, “interesting” subset? Perhaps, but like Ben, I’m skeptical. The fundamental problem is that TOSCA needs to answer the questions:

• What’s an “application?”
• What is “portability?”

Those are big, hairy, nasty, hard questions, and the various participants involved with TOSCA, hypervisor suppliers, service providers, software suppliers, and enterprises, have radically different answers to them. The question is whether there is enough common ground that can be standardized to deliver value to users.

The ServiceMesh Agility Platform also answers these questions. The Agility Platform is able to manipulate large application topologies and it is able to achieve portability of application functionality between clouds, even those based on different underlying hypervisor technology. The platform has support for SLA management which can result in autoscaling or restarting behaviors.

But there is no magic in the real world. The Agility Platform achieves all this by taking a firm point of view on the answers to the application and portability questions and does not try to come up with general answers that will suit everybody and anybody. Like an approximate solution to an NP complete computing problem that does not guarantee optimality, the Agility Platform makes compromises in an effort to deliver something of value today.

Can TOSCA do the same? That’s unlikely unless the group of OASIS participants exhibits a strong amount of compromise and self-sacrifice.

What are your thoughts on TOSCA? Weight in with a comment.

IT complexity certainly creates a tremendous burden in a large enterprise. It’s not just the time, resources, and chaos it inflicts on IT ops folks charged with running IT smoothly, but also the redundant costs and waste in building solutions on top of a complex ecosystem of different overlapping tools, platforms, and processes. That’s one reason why enterprise IT budgets tend to follow an “80/20 rule”, where 80% is consumed in maintaining the status quo, and just 20% goes to new projects that directly add business value.

Will cloud help or hurt IT complexity?

For good reason, people don’t want to add more IT complexity. However, some organizations make the mistake of assuming that cloud computing will be just another unwelcome contributor to complexity. From their near-term tactical operations perspective, they see cloud as another distinct set of infrastructure and platforms needing support, along with another set of management tools to learn and keep updated. This is actually quite shortsighted, as cloud computing can fundamentally change IT economics in their favor over the long haul.

Cloud computing actually provides a rare opportunity to standardize large portions of the enterprise IT portfolio, which results in simplification of development processes, lower support costs, and faster time to market. I mention a “rare opportunity” because cloud computing can achieve success where many others have failed due to a compelling enough “win-win” scenario for both business units and IT to drive broad adoption.

Essentially, the enterprise cloud computing end game encompasses an everything-as-a-service IT delivery model spanning internal and external IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS—complete with policy-enforced governance and broad self-service access to standardized resources. Business units win by being empowered with self-service access to the IT resources they need so they can be more responsive, and IT wins by leverages policy controls and infrastructure automation to redirect resources from low value maintenance to more meaningful cloud service innovations.

In this world, the majority of the business unit’s IT needs are met through a self-service, cloud-based portfolio of services, and any unique customization requirements are handled by IT in today’s more traditional manner. This results in IT’s role within the enterprise shifting to more of a product and portfolio manager of internal and external services, rather than a custom assembler of IT infrastructure and platforms from scratch.

Not an event, but the beginning of a journey

As Mike mentions in his article, simplifying enterprise IT is a journey, not an event. There’s hard work and challenges to overcome along the way:

• Incremental adoption plan for standardized cloud services. Organizations should adopt a plan, often starting with foundational services (such as IaaS), and adding more advanced offerings (PaaS) in a building block approach. Along the way, they should integrate these offerings into the software development lifecycle to further streamline and automate it, ideally through to final delivery.
• Assembling and optimizing a portfolio. A key success factor in this journey is assembling versatile “as-a-service” offerings that align well to the needs of business unit customers. You have to gather business requirements, take current inventory, rationalize offerings, design for vendor contestability, evaluate external/public services, and much more to do this well.
• Putting the right incentives in place for change. When working together, IT organizations and business units often gravitate toward building custom solutions. You need to put the right incentives in place to change this behavior and show how business unit requirements can be satisfied on a smaller set of optimized, standardized platforms.
• Documenting the business case along the way. It’s important to document the cost savings and cycle-time improvements as standardized offerings are rolled out. This encourages management to support continued standardization efforts, and provides case study materials to foster broader business unit adoption.

Although there’s hard work and pitfalls to avoid, the resulting benefits are worth it. Remember the 80/20 rule mentioned earlier? Imagine if you could change the economics of IT to be more like 40/60…. where 60% of IT resources were spent innovating and working on new projects that directly equate to business value, and only 40% was dedicated to maintaining the status quo. For global enterprises, the impact of that IT budget shift could be the strategic differentiator that enables entry into new markets, gaining market share, or even disrupting entire industries.

Agility Platform 7.4: Fundamentals

This 1-day course enables end users to become immediately productive using the Agility Platform.  You will learn the fundamentals of designing, deploying, and managing cloud-based workloads, including an overview of the policies that can be leveraged to ensure security, compliance, SLAs, and access controls across hybrid cloud environments.  At completion, you will be able to build, deploy, and manage your own basic cloud-based workloads.  This foundational course is recommended for all Agility Platform users.

• Duration: 1-day (7 hours)
• Format: Instructor-led with labs
• Appropriate for: Anyone
• Prerequisites: None
• Requirements: Laptop required
• Course Topics:
  • Agility Platform Overview
  • Design Concepts
  • Workload Deployment
  • Packaging and Scripting
  • Application Topology Design
  • Managing Cloud Workloads
  • Policy-Driven Governance Overview

Agility Platform 7.4: Power Users

This 1-day course enables advanced users to obtain additional expertise with the Agility Platform.  This course dives deeper into specific best practices for planning, designing, and governing complex enterprise applications.  A strong focus will be on creating and applying policies to ensure security, compliance, SLAs, and governed access to your enterprise applications and deployment environments.  At completion, you will have the skills to plan, design, deploy, and govern your own enterprise applications and environments.

• Duration: 1-day (7 hours)
• Format: Instructor-led with labs
• Appropriate for: Anyone
• Prerequisites: Agility Platform 7.4: Fundamentals
• Requirements: Laptop required
• Course Topics:
  • Application Planning
  • Complex Application Topology Design
  • Policy-Driven Governance
  • Access Control Policies
  • Provisioning Policies
  • Event-Based Policies
  • Guest Personalization Policies
  • Firewall Policies
  • Using the REST API

Agility Platform 7.4: Administration and Operations

This 1-day course prepares administrators and IT operations staff to install, configure, and manage the Agility Platform.  You will learn everything required to get the Agility Platform up and running within your environment including initial installation, configuration, and customization.

• Duration: 1-day (7 hours)
• Format: Instructor-led with labs
• Appropriate for: System Administrators, IT Operations
• Prerequisites: Agility Platform 7.4: Fundamentals and Agility Platform 7.4: Power Users
• Requirements: Laptop required
• Course Topics:
  • Deployment Options
  • Basic Installation
  • Initial Configuration
  • User and User Groups
  • Adding/Configuring a Cloud Provider
  • Extending the Meta Model
  • Modeling your Organization
  • Enforcing Permissions across the Organization
  • Best Practices

Please contact us for pricing and availability.

The simple answer is that any cloud and IT governance solution you deploy needs to have a flexible, customizable metamodel paired with an adaptable policy engine. Together, these two features will help insulate your deployment against downstream shifts in governance requirements. Of course, you’ll still have to implement the updated governance policies but the foundational technology will be able to accommodate those new requirements without a fundamental update.

“Okay, that sounds good,” I hear you say, “But what is a ‘metamodel?’”

Metadata is data about data (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata). In simple terms, think of metadata as auxiliary data that annotates the real data that we most care about. For a simple example, notice that this blog post is “tagged” with a series of terms that categorize it within the ServiceMesh web site. The text of this post is the data; the tags are metadata.

In an enterprise cloud management platform, we have a model of the real world. There are various types of objects used to help us manage our clouds. In the Agility Platform, for instance, we have objects that represent users, application topologies, workloads, scripts, and clouds (among many others). Each of these object types can be annotated with distinct metadata. A workload object, for instance, stores the data that represents the actual program bits that make up the workload (e.g., a VM image). That same workload object might have additional metadata attached to it that describe the workload’s owner and the cost center associated with it.

The “metamodel” describes the properties of the metadata:

• Which attributes apply to which object types?
• Is the attribute required?
• Is the attribute a text string or a number or a boolean or an enumeration of various labels?

Using the metamodel, we can describe all manner of requirements and additional information that apply to each of the objects in the system. We can specify that some of these pieces of metadata are required and others are optional. Going back to our workload object, for instance, we could specify that a given workload requires high performance disk access. We could specify that it needs to be deployed in a special security zone in the network. We could indicate that all costs associated with it need to be ascribed to a given development group or business unit. Metadata associated with the object allows us to store these requirements.

So, once we have a set of objects in our system, annotated with interesting metadata, what’s that useful for? The answer is that the policy system can inspect both data in the objects themselves as well as the various bits of metadata and then enforce cloud governance strategies using all that information.

An example might be workloads dealing with patient medical data covered by HIPAA. We might have a policy that says that such workloads must be located in clouds with data centers that have been audited for HIPAA compliance. The workload would have metadata asserting the HIPAA requirement and the cloud itself would have metadata stating that it can receive HIPAA workloads. The policy system would govern the behaviors associated with these two objects to ensure we get safe outcomes. But policies can extend far beyond simple issues of cloud placement. For instance, we might require that HIPAA workloads use disk encryption and other security settings. The policy system would also enforce all of these requirements using the appropriate metadata described in the metamodel.

Now, the alternative to a flexible metamodel coupled with a policy engine would be to hardcode a all the assumptions about HIPAA compliance or PCI compliance or whatnot into the policy system, but that would be brittle. There would be no way to handle future regulatory requirements. Further, your organization might have different requirements than other organizations. For instance, even under the same regulatory or governance regime, many implementation details are left open to interpretation by governing bodies and auditors. Your particular auditors might require specific actions of you that are different than others, for example. Your particular company might be aggressive or conservative in its regulatory interpretations. By using a fully customizable metamodel, the cloud management platform and policy system can adapt to the fine points of your particular governance requirements, both now and in the future. If new laws are enacted or you switch auditors and they want to see something slightly different than what you were doing before, a customizable metamodel allows you to adapt with a minimum of time and trouble.

By pairing a customizable metamodel and a sophisticated policy system, you can ensure that your cloud can keep up with changing IT governance requirements down the road. Of course, the Agility Platform has these capabilities and ServiceMesh is always available to discuss your particular requirements. Contact us for more information.