The enStratus Blog

Enterprise Cloud Management in 2010...How Far We've Come

As 2011 fast approaches, it is good to take a step back and see the evolution and progress of the cloud market this year. We definitely see momentum in the cloud infrastructure space for enterprises and government organizations.

Nothing shows momentum like real world customers and market trends. Some examples are listed below.

• Virtualization and Private Clouds continue to expand. According to Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman, virtual machine penetration has increased 50% in the last year and nearly 30% of all workloads running on x86 architecture servers are now running on virtual machines. Mr. Bittman also stated, “cloud computing continues to grow, but there is more real activity and near-term spending on private cloud solutions.”

• Fortune 1000 to the cloud. During 2010, enStratus saw Fortune 1000 companies start to initiate Proof of Concepts for enterprise applications in the cloud. This includes production public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds and even integration with legacy applications and infrastructure. On-premise deployments of enStratus also increased as the year went along. This is a huge advancement from earlier in the year in which much of the focus was on education, development and testing of cloud infrastructure.

• U. S. Government Cloud First Policy. A report just published in December 2010 by the U.S. CIO, Vivek Kundra focuses on a 25 point implementation plan to reform Federal Information Technology Management.  This includes the requirement by each federal agency to have at least one service to be in the cloud within 12 months of the report.  Would you have ever imagined that earlier in the year?  This initiative represents a substantial tangible effort by the government to leverage the cloud computing model to meet IT requirements.

• Telcos moving to the cloud. Telcos and managed hosting providers around the world are increasingly planning and deploying private and public cloud solutions. These organizations are all moving to cloud computing as the competition increases and their clients demand expanded cloud offerings. One example is the largest telco in Korea, KT, who is working with Cloud.com and enStratus to deliver a range of new cloud services.

• Cloud automation kicks in. Companies are increasingly incorporating cloud automation tools from enStratus and partner companies like Opscode to improve the efficiency of their cloud deployment.  We saw more cross-cloud automation activity which will definitely continue in 2011.

With this type of momentum happening this past year, the whole team at enStratus is excited to see what the New Year brings.

We wish you the best in 2011 on your cloud initiatives.

Happy holidays from the entire staff at enStratus.

Common Goals of Cloud Management and Great User Experience

I had the opportunity to represent enStratus at two conferences recently. I didn't expect them to be anything alike, as they represented two divergent aspects of my role at enStratus.

The first was CloudCamp Boston—an unconference typically attended by tech-savvy early cloud adopters, or business people steeped in knowledge relating to the cloud. The second was An Event Apart Minneapolis—a two-day conference involving the various disciplines necessary to create great web experiences with today's technologies, including design, development, content and usability. Star Trek jokes got a few chuckles, don't get me wrong, but web fonts sparked more passionate responses from this crowd. 

Even if these events had taken place in the same city or venue I wouldn't have expected any cross-over attendance. That's why I'm surprised to realize, in retrospect, that they actually shared so much in common. The most striking similarity was the recurrent theme of the open web and standards.

Openness and standards

Both conferences placed a lot of value on the path to standardization, developed in accordance with business needs. Browser prefixes are providing the necessary flexibility as new CSS3 standards are reworked and refined in real time, and HTML5 (notably not XHTML) are being crafted with a heavy emphasis on what has and has not worked in the wild, and what's been sorely lacking.  

The path to standardization for cloud computing is less clear, but it's clearly similarly valued. The first conversation I joined in Boston covered things like how to improve the interoperability of cloud API's as well the separate conversation of how to standardize data for interoperability. It was noted that partnerships of Salesforce represent a successful example of business needs driving the development of API's. How can these efforts be truly open, collaborative, embraced AND future-proof as business needs evolve? Where do open source communities (as well as open source API's such as Dasein Cloud) fit into the equation? 

The second shared theme that I noticed between the two conferences was all about practicality.

What's available NOW?  What can we take advantage of in 2010?

HTML5 and CSS3 are technically still in spec mode. But anybody that sits around waiting for finalized standards is missing the boat. Conversations were focused on what is already available and what can be leveraged to improve the user experience of our websites and applications. enStratus has earned a reputation for the ease-of-use of it's console, and we're in the process of building on that success with these new technologies.

One conversation I joined in Boston focused on what's ready now in the cloud space. Most of the discussion related to software as a service (and what counts as such) but questions arose about what aspects of infrastructure as a service are really, truly ready for operation.

While the conversations at both conferences related to each other, they were also common with the value of enStratus. In terms of openness and standards, enStratus already supports about a dozen private and public cloud platforms, and has contributed the Dasein Cloud API to provide an abstraction for applications written independent of the clouds they are controlling. enStratus is also one of the original supporters of OpenStack. Perhaps even more exciting is that by addressing the concerns relating to cloud interoperability, security, reliability and backups, enStratus can be leveraged now, in 2010, by enterprises ready to see the benefits of cloud computing.