Category: Cloud services

For data that never rests, NetApp NDAS

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Cloud storage, Data, data access, data mobility, File Storage, Information economy, Strategic Inflection Points

NetApp co-founder, Dave Hitz announced he was becoming a NetApp Founder Emeritus at the Storage Field Day (SFD18) show. He gave a great session about what he and his Hitz foundation’s been doing (for one example see our Archeology meets big data, post). He also discussed at length where he felt the storage world (and NetApp) must do to address the opportunities of the new cloud world. But this post isn’t about Dave, it’s about NetApp Data Availability Service, NDAS.

NetApp NDAS, currently in Beta but GAing (hopefully) later this year, is an AWS marketplace data orchestration solution that manages primary to secondary to S3 movement for ONTAP data. Essentially, NetApp Data Availability Services extends ONTAP data lifecycle management to AWS cloud. But it’s more than just a way to archive ONTAP data.

NDAS orchestrates Snapmirror services across ONTAP systems and AWS. But once your ONTAP data is in S3 it supplies access to that data for authorized AWS applications and services. That way one can use their ONTAP data to provide data analytics, train AI models, and do just about anything you can do with AWS applications today. By using NDAS, customers can extract more value from their ONTAP data.

NDAS is not just copying data to S3 but is also copying ONTAP metadata, catalogues and other information that provides context for that data. By copying ONTAP catalog information, customers and authorized end users can have file level access to ONTAP data residing in S3 objects.

NDAS today, only supports copying data from secondary ONTAP systems to S3. But a future enhancement will expand this to copy primary ONTAP data to S3.

How does NDAS work

NDAS provisions (your) EC2 instances, and middleware to read the data from the secondary systems and copy it to S3 buckets which you provide. NDAS after initial configuration to point to your ONTAP secondary storage systems, will autodiscover all the data available that can be copied to the cloud.

NDAS will start cataloguing your ONTAP data. NDAS EC2 instances support the NDAS copy, view and a Google-like search processes.

NDAS search presents a simplified file system view into your ONTAP data copied to S3. That way customers can identify data that could be used for AI training or data analytics that run in the cloud to access the data.

There’s extensive security to insure that NDAS is properly authorized to access your ONTAP data. Normal S3 security options also apply such as to have the data be encrypted on S3. NDAS data is automatically encrypted in flight.

Moreover, NDAS S3 bucket data can be replicated across AWS regions . Also serverless/lambda funationality are fully supported from or NDAS S3 buckets. .

What can it do with the data

AWS applications can access the data directly through NDAS APIs. Or customers can manually extract data they want to further process using the NDAS GUI to identify and copy data of interests. NDAS essentially creates a small app layer that allows users to view and access the ONTAP data in S3 as a file system.

One can have different NDAS AMIs operating in different regions for faster access or to support GDPR compliance requirements. Alternatively, a customer could have one NDAS AMI accessing all their secondary ONTAP instances.

NDAS is intended to provide a data analyst or IT generalist access to ONTAP data. This way AI training and big data analytics applications which run easily in the cloud, can have access to ONTAP data. In this way, customers can more effectively utilize data that IT has been storing and maintaining, since time began.

One NDAS beta customer is a MLB team. They have over time instrumented their stadiums to generate lot’s of data about pitch speed, rotation, ball location as it crosses the plate, etc.   The problem with all this data is siloed in onprem or IOT systems that generated it. But the customer wants to use the data to improve players, coaches and the viewer experience. And all that needs tools, applications and software that’s just not available to run in the data center. But with NDAS all this data is now available to cloud applications.

NDAS is supported by any ONTAP 9.5 or later (FAS, AFF, Cloud ONTAP, ONTAPselect) secondary storage system. ONTAP 9.5 software contains all the services required to support NDAS. This includes the copy-to-cloud APIs, as well as the NDAS proxy, which supplies the secure interface to NDAS operating in the cloud.

NetApp’s NDAS sessions are pretty informative. Anyone interested in finding out more should checkout the videos available on TechFieldDay website and Dave’s session is also worth a view.

For more information on Dave’s session and NDAS check out:

NetApp, Cloudier than ever by Enrico Signoretti (@ESignoretti)

NetApp and the space in between by Dan Frith (@PenguinPunk)

~~~~

Comments?

NetApp’s new NVMeoF/FC AFF & Cloud Data Volumes for every cloud

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud services, Cloud storage, Clustered storage, FC, File Storage, NVMe, SSD storage, Storage, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points

We attended a NetApp analyst event in their CA HQ last week and they had some interesting announcements as well other information to share. 1st up new faster ONTAP storage.

NVMeoF AFF

NetApp announced this week that their latest generation AFF (All Flash FAS) systems will support FC NVMeoF. We asked if this was just for NVMe SSDs or did it apply to all AFF media. The answer was it’s just another host interface which the customer can license for NVMe SSDs (available only on AFF F800) or SAS SSDs (A700S, A700, and A300). The only AFF not supporting the new host interface is their lowend AFF A220.

As for which NVMeoF, they only support FC at the moment, and it’s our belief that the FC NVMeoF spec is most well defined these days and the FC switch hardware (Brocade-Broadcom since Gen 5, now shipping Gen 6, Cisco not sure) already has NVMeoF support.

NetApp also mentioned support for 100GbE (A800 & A700S only) and 32Gbs FC hardware (all AFF systems but A220). So, presumably they offer NVMeoF for both 32Gbps and 16Gbps FC.

No word on when this will be available for Ethernet FCoE or iSCSI (iNVMe?) but with all the major storage vendors bar one, moving to NVMe SSDs it’s only a matter of time before they also support Ethernet NVMeoF.

As for AFF NVMeoF performance, the answer wasn’t entirely satisfactory. The indication was that the interface reduced response time by 10 usecs or so for NVMe SSDs over SAS SSDs. But I didn’t see any other performance information to substantiate that.

We did see on their AFF datasheet that with NVMe SSDs and NVMeoF FC, the AFF A800 response time was sub 200usec with throughput of 300GB/s (in a 24 node cluster, 12 HA pairs). This means they add only about 100usec for ONTAP data services, a decent trade off from our perspective. Later in their datasheet they say the A800 is capable of 1.3M IOPS and sub-500usec latencies. Unsure why they quoted both numbers.

Cloud Data Volumes

NetApp is taking storage to the cloud. They just announced that NetApp Cloud Data Volumes will be available as a native service under Google Cloud Platform (GCP). NetApp Cloud Data Volume is a storage-as-a-service offering that provides on demand ONTAP file services in the cloud.

For GCP,  both Google and NetApp will be offering the service. Dianne Green, GCP VP said Cloud Data Volumes are a bit like Kubernetes, disruption without disrupting. Customers can easily migrate their onprem file based applications to the cloud without having to worry about the performance of their data or data protection for that matter.

Getting the data there is another matter, but NetApp has other services like CloudSync and someday (maybe for Cloud Data Volumes), SnapMirror, which can help customers move data to and from the cloud.

Currently Cloud Data Volumes are in public preview as an Microsoft Azure Enterprise NFS (and SMB) service. It’s also in beta (I think) in AWS marketplace. And availability on GCP is still restricted. There’s a lot of emphasis at NetApp events on Cloud Data Volumes given its current status on public cloud providers but we think they are trying to gain some experience before they roll it out to the rest of the world.

However,  Jean English, NetApp CMO mentioned that NetApp’s Cloud Data Service business unit has over 1800 customers and currently supports a multi-PB storage footprint in various clouds. Note, this is not just Cloud Data Volumes but comprises all NetApp Cloud Data Services, which includes ONTAP Cloud, NPS, CloudSync, AltaVault, etc. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive indicator of just how far they have come in applying their storage magic to the public cloud in a short time. The hyperscalers (read public cloud providers) say NetApp is 2 or more years ahead of all the other competition and from what we can see, it’s true.

One of the key differentiators between NetApp Cloud Data Volumes and ONTAP Cloud is performance SLAs. Cloud Data Volume customers can select and purchase a specified performance SLA. We believe it comes at three levels and is normally purchased on a pay as you go, consumption based, service offering. However, it’s also available to be billed periodically, other purchase options may be available as well.

When asked what storage was behind the service, the only thing NetApp would confirm was that it was ONTAP storage, present in public cloud data centers in various regions. So Cloud Data Volumes is available in only specific regions but I would expect that to expand over time.

Data Visualization Center

They also christened their new Data Visualization Center (DVC) and we had a multi-course meal at the Bistro at the center. The DVC had a wrap around, 1.5 floor tall screen which showed some of NetApp customer success stories. Inside the screen was a more immersive setting and there was plenty of VR equipment in work spaces alongside customer conference rooms.

Full Disclosure: NetApp paid for all our travel, hotel and food during the analyst event and gave us all Google Home Minis as going away presents and NetApp is a long time customer of my firm.

A tale of two storage companies – NetApp and Vantara (HDS-Insight Grp-Pentaho)

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Data growth, Distributed computing, Executive leadership, Information economy, Market dynamics, Strategy, Visionary organizations

It was the worst of times. The industry changes had been gathering for a decade almost and by this time were starting to hurt.

The cloud was taking over all new business and some of the old. Flash’s performance was making high performance easy and reducing storage requirements commensurately. Software defined was displacing low and midrange storage, which was fine for margins but injurious to revenues.

Both companies had user events in Vegas the last month, NetApp Insight 2017 last week and Hitachi NEXT2017 conference two weeks ago.

As both companies respond to industry trends, they provide an interesting comparison to watch companies in transition.

Company role

  • NetApp’s underlying theme is to change the world with data and they want to change to help companies do this.
  • Vantara’s philosophy is data and processing is ultimately moving into the Internet of things (IoT) and they want to be wherever the data takes them.

Hitachi Vantara is a brand new company that combines Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group and Pentaho (an analytics acquisition) into one organization to go after the IoT market. Pentaho will continue as a separate brand/subsidiary, but HDS and Insight Group cease to exist as separate companies/subsidiaries and are now inside Vantara.

NetApp sees transitions occurring in the way IT conducts business but ultimately, a continuing and ongoing role for IT. NetApp’s ultimate role is as a data service provider to IT.

Customer problem

  • Vantara believes the main customer issue is the need to digitize the business. Because competition is emerging everywhere, the only way for a company to succeed against this interminable onslaught is to digitize everything. That is digitize your manufacturing/service production, sales, marketing, maintenance, any and all customer touch points, across your whole value chain and do it as rapidly as possible. If you don’t your competition will.
  • NetApp sees customers today have three potential concerns: 1) how to modernize current infrastructure; 2) how to take advantage of (hybrid) cloud; and 3) how to build out the next generation data center. Modernization is needed to free capital and expense from traditional IT for use in Hybrid cloud and next generation data centers. Most organizations have all three going on concurrently.

Vantara sees the threat of startups, regional operators and more advanced digitized competitors as existential for today’s companies. The only way to keep your business alive under these onslaughts is to optimize your value delivery. And to do that, you have to digitize every step in that path.

NetApp views the threat to IT as originating from LoB/shadow IT originating applications born and grown in the cloud or other groups creating next gen applications using capabilities outside of IT.

Product direction

  • NetApp is looking mostly towards the cloud. At their conference they announced a new Azure NFS service powered by NetApp. They already had Cloud ONTAP and NPS, both current cloud offerings, a software defined storage in the cloud and a co-lo hardware offering directly attached to public cloud (Azure & AWS), respectively.
  • Vantara is looking towards IoT. At their conference they announced Lumada 2.0, an Industrial IoT (IIoT) product framework using plenty of Hitachi software functionality and intended to bring data and analytics under one software umbrella.

NetApp is following a path laid down years past when they devised the data fabric. Now, they are integrating and implementing data fabric across their whole product line. With the ultimate goal that wherever your data goes, the data fabric will be there to help you with it.

Vantara is broadening their focus, from IT products and solutions to IoT. It’s not so much an abandoning present day IT, as looking forward to the day where present day IT is just one cog in an ever expanding, completely integrated digital entity which the new organization becomes.

They both had other announcements, NetApp announced ONTAP 9.3, Active IQ (AI applied to predictive service) and FlexPod SF ([H]CI with SolidFire storage) and Vantara announced a new IoT turnkey appliance running Lumada and a smart data center (IoT) solution.

Who’s right?

They both are.

Digitization is the future, the sooner organizations realize and embrace this, the better for their long term health. Digitization will happen with or without organizations and when it does, it will result in a significant re-ordering of today’s competitive landscape. IoT is one component of organizational digitization, specifically outside of IT data centers, but using IT resources.

In the mean time, IT must become more effective and efficient. This means it has to modernize to free up resources to support (hybrid) cloud applications and supply the infrastructure needed for next gen applications.

One could argue that Vantara is positioning themselves for the long term and NetApp is positioning themselves for the short term. But that denies the possibility that IT will have a role in digitization. In the end both are correct and both can succeed if they deliver on their promise.

Comments?

 

VMworld2017’s forecast, cloudy with a high chance of containers

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, data mobility

Attended VMworld2017 this past week in Vegas and aside from all the parties there was a lot of news, mostly for public cloud users.

In talking with analysts and others at the show it seems like VMware has recently discovered that they can’t fight the cloud, so they better join them. Early this year VMware divested itself of its vCloud Air Business to OVH, which removed their owned competition to the cloud. Now, VMware’s on a different tack, figuring out how to best work with today’s public cloud providers and implementing this.

Last year VMware announced an agreement with IBM and to supply vCloud Air services on IBM’s SoftLayer public cloud. This year, VMware ramps up other public cloud offerings with VMware Cloud on AWS and PKS (Pivotal Container Services) on vSphere.

First up, VMware on the (AWS) cloud

You may recall that earlier this year VMware showed a tech preview of vSphere running in AWS. At VMworld2017 they took off the wraps on this service and made it real. At first it’s only available in AWS US WEST region but they plan to roll it out to the rest of US soon and rest of the world after that.

VMware Cloud on AWS is vSphere, vCenter, NSX, and vSAN running ontop of AWS Elastic cloud services. Essentially, any VM that you run onprem, can be run on AWS, using VMware Cloud on AWS.

The AWS EC2 machines you run VMware on are BIG – 2 CPU, 36 cores (72 hyper threads) with 512GiB of memory and a local (SSD) cache of 3.6TB/10.7TB raw capacity. VMware Cloud on AWS requires four EC2 instances to run. No information about the networking capabilities but I assume HIGH SPEED.

The cost for the service is high but you are paying for 7x24x365 AWS EC2 services. For a 3 year “reservation”, it will cost $109.4K/host. That comes out to be about $3K/month/host for 36 months. VMware claims that on a 3 year TCO basis this would be cheaper than running an equivalent configuration onprem.

You can also contract for VMware Cloud on AWS on an hourly basis. You do have to have a VMware login and VMware credits (?) to do so. It’s certainly not as simple as just having a credit card and an AWS login. But the costs for this are $8.361/hour/host. This seems awfully high but there’s no direct comparison to other EC2 machine configurations. Although there is an EC2 X1.16 with 64 vCPUs (hyper thread equivalents), 976GiB DRAM and 1-1920 (GiB) SSD that lists for $6.669/hour – close, but not a complete match.

You are running a VMware service on AWS so the billing is done through VMware. And any data you move in or out of the cloud will be billed (through VMware) at whatever AWS would charge for the data egress/import.

It seems that if you “connect” your VMware Cloud on AWS to your onprem   vSphere cluster (through stretched layer 2 NSX networking and ? other means) you can vMotion VMs from onprem to AWS and back again. There is a behind the scenes Storage vMotion that also happens to get the data to AWS so that the VMs can operate properly.

VMware vCenter offers a dashboard of sorts to tell admins whether a particular VM is a good candidate to move to AWS or not. This is based on the VM’s connections to other VMs and maybe the amount of data that would need to moved.


Next, (PKS) containers and more (GCP) cloud

VMware together with Pivotal and Google Cloud announced a tech preview of the Pivotal Container Service (PKS) on vSphere. The new service implements Pivotal Kubo, or Kubernetes container orchestration with Bosh HA infrastructure management ontop of vSphere. PKS also comes with Harbor a secure, enterprise class container registry from VMware

This would allow a development team to develop a container micro-services application, completely within a VMware environment and to run it under vSphere. This seems tailor made to cloud developers.

Kubernetes has worker and master nodes and each which would run as a VM on vSphere. Inside worker nodes, Kubernetes runs Pods which have one or more tightly connected container(s) which enclose an application and share context.

I was talking with the vSphere team and they had been spending a lot of time making vSphere native services available to PKS. This means that you can use NSX networking and vSAN, VVOLs or VMDK storage for your container (persistent) storage.

Not exactly sure where DevOps fits into PKS on vSphere but my assumption is that you could run Puppet, Chef or if your up to the challenge, vRA to automate application roll out.

There was specific talk of having PKS run on AWS, probably within VMware Cloud on AWS in the future.

Of course, PKS containers that run on vSphere are completely compatible with GKE (Google Container Engine) which runs on Google Cloud Platform

No information on VMware PKS pricing as of yet.

Where lies Photon and VIC (VMware Integrated Containers)

You may recall that VMware announced Photon last year which was a open source container framework and Photon OS which was an OS for Photon containers. This still exists as an open source project and is still being developed but there was nary a word about Photon this year.

VIC still exists. VIC can support running a container as a VM but is not a real container orchestration engine. Yes you could potentially run Docker Swarm as VM or a number of containers as separate VMs under VI, but this is not the same as having a fully integrated container orchestration and management service layer in vSphere. That’s where PKS fits in.

~~~~

Although timelines weren’t discussed there were a number of discussions that led me to believe that VMware on AWS would be rolled out to other public cloud provider (read Azure and GCP). And how long it would take to be rolled out to other AWS regions around the world was not discussed.  VMware Cloud would really make sense to run on GCP, but Azure might be a bit of a stretch.

Similarly, PKS seems already heading for VMware Cloud on AWS and is already available in native form as GKE on GCP. But Azure already has a native Kubernetes Container Service. And there was no discussion as to whether PKS would be made available on IBM Softlayer or OVH vCloud Air.

Stay tuned more to come as VMware finds its true path to the cloud.

Google releases new Cloud TPU & Machine Learning supercomputer in the cloud

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Cloud services, Cognitive computing, Distributed computing, Machine Learning, Neural network, System effectiveness, Visionary organizations

Last year about this time Google released their 1st generation TPU chip to the world (see my TPU and HW vs. SW … post for more info).

This year they are releasing a new version of their hardware called the Cloud TPU chip and making it available in a cluster on their Google Cloud.  Cloud TPU is in Alpha testing now. As I understand it, access to the Cloud TPU will eventually be free to researchers who promise to freely publish their research and at a price for everyone else.

But first please take our new poll:

What’s different between TPU v1 and Cloud TPU v2

The differences between version 1 and 2 mostly seem to be tied to training Machine Learning Models.

TPU v1 didn’t have any real ability to train machine learning (ML) models. It was a relatively dumb (8 bit ALU) chip but if you had say a ML model already created to do something like understand speech, you could load that model into the TPU v1 board and have it be executed very fast. The TPU v1 chip board was also placed on a separate PCIe board (I think), connected to normal x86 CPUs  as sort of a CPU accelerator. The advantage of TPU v1 over GPUs or normal X86 CPUs was mostly in power consumption and speed of ML model execution.

Cloud TPU v2 looks to be a standalone multi-processor device, that’s connected to others via what looks like Ethernet connections. One thing that Google seems to be highlighting is the Cloud TPU’s floating point performance. A Cloud TPU device (board) is capable of 180 TeraFlops (trillion or 10^12 floating point operations per second). A 64 Cloud TPU device pod can theoretically execute 11.5 PetaFlops (10^15 FLops).

TPU v1 had no floating point capabilities whatsoever. So Cloud TPU is intended to speed up the training part of ML models which requires extensive floating point calculations. Presumably, they have also improved the ML model execution processing in Cloud TPU vs. TPU V1 as well. More information on their Cloud TPU chips is available here.

So how do you code a TPU?

Both TPU v1 and Cloud TPU are programmed by Google’s open source TensorFlow. TensorFlow is a set of software libraries to facilitate numerical computation via data flow graph programming.

Apparently with data flow programming you have many nodes and many more connections between them. When a connection is fired between nodes it transfers a multi-dimensional matrix (tensor) to the node. I guess the node takes this multidimensional array does some (floating point) calculations on this data and then determines which of its outgoing connections to fire and how to alter the tensor to send to across those connections.

Apparently, TensorFlow works with X86 servers, GPU chips, TPU v1 or Cloud TPU. Google TensorFlow 1.2.0 is now available. Google says that TensorFlow is in use in over 6000 open source projects. TensorFlow uses Python and 1.2.0 runs on Linux, Mac, & Windows. More information on TensorFlow can be found here.

So where can I get some Cloud TPUs

Google is releasing their new Cloud TPU in the TensorFlow Research Cloud (TFRC). The TFRC has 1000 Cloud TPU devices connected together which can be used by any organization to train machine learning algorithms and execute machine learning algorithms.

I signed up (here) to be an alpha tester. During the signup process the site asked me: what hardware (GPUs, CPUs) and platforms I was currently using to training my ML models; how long does my ML model take to train; how large a training (data) set do I use (ranging from 10GB to >1PB) as well as other ML model oriented questions. I guess there trying to understand what the market requirements are outside of Google’s own use.

Google’s been using more ML and other AI technologies in many of their products and this will no doubt accelerate with the introduction of the Cloud TPU. Making it available to others is an interesting play but this would be one way to amortize the cost of creating the chip. Another way would be to sell the Cloud TPU directly to businesses, government agencies, non government agencies, etc.

I have no real idea what I am going to do with alpha access to the TFRC but I was thinking maybe I could feed it all my blog posts and train a ML model to start writing blog post for me. If anyone has any other ideas, please let me know.

Comments?

Photo credit(s): From Google’s website on the new Cloud TPU

Disaster recovery from VMware to AWS using Dell EMC Avamar & Data Domain

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Cloud storage, Disaster Recovery, Object storage, System effectiveness

avI was at Dell EMC World2017 last week and although most of the news was on Dell’s new 14th generation server and Dell-EMC integration progress, Wednesday’s keynote was devoted to storage and non-server infrastructure news.

There was plenty of non-server news but one item that caught my attention was new functionality from Dell EMC Data Protection Division that used Avamar and Data Domain to provide disaster recovery for VMware VMs directly to AWS.

Data Domain (AWS) Cloud DR

Dell EMC Data Domain Cloud DR (DDCDR) is  a new capability that enables DD to backup to AWS S3 object storage and when needed restart the virtual machines within AWS.

DDCDR requires that a customer with Avamar backup and Data Domain (DD) storage install an OVA which deploys an “add-on” to their on-prem Avamar/DD system and install a lightweight VM (Cloud DR server) utility in their AWS domain.

Once the OVA is installed, it will read the changed data and will segment, encrypt, and compress the backup data and then send this and the backup metadata to AWS S3 objects. Avamar/DD policies can be established to control how many daily backup copies are to be saved to S3 object storage. There’s no need for Data Domain or Avamar to run in AWS.

When there’s a problem at the primary data center, an admin can click on a Avamar GUI button and have the Cloud DR server, uncompress, decrypt, rehydrate and restore the backup data into EBS volumes, translate the VMware VM image to an AMI image and then restarts the AMI on an AWS virtual server (EC2) with its data on EBS volume storage. The Cloud DR server will use the backup metadata to select the AWS EC2 instance with the proper CPU and RAM needed to run the application. Once this completes, the VM is running standalone, in an AWS EC2 instance. Presumably, you have to have EC2 and EBS storage volumes resources available under your AWS domain to be able to install the application and restore its data.

For simplicity purposes, the user can control almost all of the required functionality for DDCDR from the Avamar GUI alone. But in case of a site outage, the user can initiate the application DR from a portal supplied by the Cloud DR server utility.

There you have it, simplified, easy to use (AWS) Cloud DR for your VM applications all through Dell EMC Avamar, Data Domain storage and DDCDR. At the moment, it only works with AWS cloud but it’s likely to be available for other public clouds in the near future.

~~~~

There was much more infrastructure news at Dell EMC World2017. I’ll discuss more details on their new storage offerings in my upcoming Storage Intelligence newsletter, due out the end of this month. If your interested in receiving your own copy of my newsletter, checkout the signup button in the upper right of this page.

Comments?

[Edits were made for readability and technical accuracy after this post was published. Ed]

The fragility of public cloud IT

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Cloud services, data services, Information economy, Internet of Things, Internet traffic, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

I have been reading AntiFragile again (by Nassim Taleb). And although he would probably disagree with my use of his concepts, it appears to me that IT is becoming more fragile, not less.

For example, recent outages at major public cloud providers display increased fragility for IT. Yet these problems, although almost national in scope, seldom deter individual organizations from their migration to the cloud.

Tragedy of the cloud commons

The issues are somewhat similar to the tragedy of the commons. When more and more entities use a common pool of resources, occasionally that common pool can become degraded. But because no-one really owns the common resources no one has any incentive to improve the situation.

Now the public cloud, although certainly a common pool of resources, is also most assuredly owned by corporations. So it’s not a true tragedy of the commons problem. Public cloud corporations have a real incentive to improve their services.

However, the fragility of IT in general, the web, and other electronic/data services all increases as they become more and more reliant on public cloud, common infrastructure. And I would propose this general IT fragility is really not owned by any one person, corporation or organization, let alone the public cloud providers.

Pre-cloud was less fragile, post-cloud more so

In the old days of last century, pre-cloud, if a human screwed up a CLI command the worst they could happen was to take out a corporation’s data services. Nowadays, post-cloud, if a similar human screws up a CLI command, the worst that can happen is that major portions of the internet services of a nation go down.

Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)

Yes, over time, public cloud services have become better at not causing outages, but they aren’t going away. And if anything, better public cloud services just encourages more corporations to use them for more data services, causing any subsequent cloud outage to be more impactful, not less

The Internet was originally designed by DARPA to be more resilient to failures, outages and nuclear attack. But by centralizing IT infrastructure onto public cloud common infrastructure, we are reversing the web’s inherent fault tolerance and causing IT to be more susceptible to failures.

What can be done?

There are certainly things that can be done to improve the situation and make IT less fragile in the short and long run:

  1. Use the cloud for non-essential or temporary data services, that don’t hurt a corporation, organization or nation when outages occur.
  2. Build in fault-tolerance, automatic switchover for public cloud data services to other regions/clouds.
  3. Physically partition public cloud infrastructure into more regions and physically separate infrastructure segments within regions, such that any one admin has limited control over an amount of public cloud infrastructure.
  4. Divide an organizations or nations data services across public cloud infrastructures, across as many regions and segments as possible.
  5. Create a National Public IT Safety Board, not unlike the one for transportation, that does a formal post-mortem of every public cloud outage, proposes fixes, and enforces fix compliance.

The National Public IT Safety Board

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has worked well for air transportation. It relies on the cooperation of multiple equipment vendors, airlines, countries and other parties. It performs formal post mortems on any air transportation failure. It also enforces any fixes in processes, procedures, training and any other activities on equipment vendors, maintenance services, pilots, airlines and other entities that can impact public air transport safety. At the moment, air transport is probably the safest form of transportation available, and much of this is due to the NTSB

We need something similar for public (cloud) IT services. Yes most public cloud companies are doing this sort of work themselves in isolation, but we have a pressing need to accelerate this process across cloud vendors to improve public IT reliability even faster.

The public cloud is here to stay and if anything will become more encompassing, running more and more of the worlds IT. And as IoT, AI and automation becomes more pervasive, data processes that support these services, which will, no doubt run in the cloud, can impact public safety. Just think of what would happen in the future if an outage occurred in a major cloud provider running the backend for self-guided car algorithms during rush hour.

If the public cloud is to remain (at this point almost inevitable) then the safety and continuous functioning of this infrastructure becomes a public concern. As such, having a National Public IT Safety Board seems like the only way to have some entity own IT’s increased fragility due to  public cloud infrastructure consolidation.

~~~~

In the meantime, as corporations, government and other entities contemplate migrating data services to the cloud, they should consider the broader impact they are having on the reliability of public IT. When public cloud outages occur, all organizations suffer from the reduced public perception of IT service reliability.

Photo Credits: Fragile by Bart Everson; Fragile Planet by Dave Ginsberg; Strange Clouds by Michael Roper

Docker presents at Cloud Field Day 1 (CFD1)

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Distributed computing, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

img_6933Earlier this summer, Docker presented at Cloud Field Day 1 (CFD1) on some of their current technology and upcoming enhancements. (See the video’s here).

As you probably recall, Docker is an implementation of Linux containers which is a way of packaging applications into micro-services that can be built, ship and run across onprem, private and public cloud infrastructure.

Docker containers and Docker Engine

Docker containers combine a base OS image, plus whatever other binaries are needed to run a micro-service into a container which runs ontop of a Docker Engine.  Containers can then be run as a single instance or multiple instances on a Docker Engine.

img_6943Containers are not VMs, they have a fundamentally different architecture. For instance,

  • A VM includes a full OS and App software, it often takes several minutes to boot up and there is a hypervisor underneath it that emulates hardware and other critical services needed to run a VM. But there is no underlying standard OS under the VM layer.
  • A Docker container relies on shared OS resources, which allows for a lighter weight application package using shared resources, which means that instantiation/booting up is much faster, there is no Hypervisor, but a container can run under Linux, Windows or Mac OSs, and containers provide for full stack portability.

In the Docker Hub (srepository for Docker containers) one can find a WordPress container that contains the whole LAMP + WordPress stack in a single container. To run WordPress you would also need a MySQL or compatible database and there’s a MySQL machine container that can be used. You could easily run both the WordPress/LAMP container and the MySQL container in the same Docker Engine, connect the two together and connect the LAMP+Wordpress container to the Internet to fire up a WordPress blog site.

Docker compared VMs to houses and containers to apartments. Docker Engines can run as a VM or on bare metal hardware.

Running Docker containers on desktop, servers and in the cloud

img_6938If you want to experiment with Docker, you can download Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows which can be used install and run a native Docker engine on your desktop.

Windows Server also supports native Docker containers. In VMware one can run Docker containers under vSphere Integrated Containers which supplies Docker API endpoints as standard ESX VMs or you can run Docker containers under Project Photon which is a streamlined, non-ESX hypervisor that also supplies Docker API endpoints.

You can run Docker containers in AWS and Azure as well that integrates with each public cloud’s compute, network and storage services.

Docker Swarm

So you have your Docker engine running, with multiple containers sharing resources and to create an application but your out of compute, storage or networking power on your engine and need to bring on another server or two.  What do you do? With Docker 1.12, you can now use Docker Swarm, which supports multiple Docker Engines.

With Docker Swarm, you have management nodes and worker nodes. Management nodes provide HA services for Docker containers which runs across multiple worker nodes. Worker nodes run Docker Engines with multiple containers.

img_6940Docker Swarms orchestrates the operation of multiple Docker Engines running Docker Services.

A Docker Service is a Docker container running across multiple worker nodes (engines) in a Docker Swarm. Docker services can be run globally (across each worker node) or replicated (some number of Docker Container instances are run across one or more worker nodes). You specify on the Docker Service command which you want and Swarm will insure that the specifications selected are implemented across its worker nodes.

If a worker node goes down, Swarm will detect it and re-start the failed container instances on other worker nodes in the Swarm. Beware, if your container relied on persistent storage, that storage must be also available to all Swarm worker nodes.

Swarm provides a Routing Mesh. When you fire up a container service you can identify a swarm-wide ingress port for a container. Every worker node will listen in on that port to provide a container-aware routing service to route app requests across the Swarm to wherever the containers are currently running.

You can have multiple Swarm management nodes which share the management of the Swarm. Swarm management nodes are either leaders or followers and provide a RAFT consensus model. If the leader node goes down, another management node will take on its leadership role and start managing the Swarm.

There are many other technologies underneath Docker Swarm that are worth a look but suffice it to say it provides a load-balancing, HA service for container execution across multiple engines.

Docker Datacenter

What could possibly be missing? We have Docker Engines that can run multiple containers and Docker Swarms that can run multiple Docker Engines and containers in an HA manner. But we really need something that supports multiple Docker Swarms,  and throw in a private secure Container repository and enterprise support options while you’re at it.

Earlier this year Docker introduced Docker Datacenter, a priced service offering which does just that.  It provides Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) across multiple Docker Swarms that has commercial support options, a Docker Trusted Repository and integrates it all with enterprise services like LDAP/AD to provide audit logs and other monitoring capabilities for container services execution.

Using Docker Datacenter, developers can have their own multiple development swarms to support engineering activities and ship and store their container images in a secure, private repository and operations can have multiple Swarms which all run the same Docker Container apps in an HA manner.

From an app developer standpoint, it all looks like container instances are running in the same Docker Engine environment across all those implementations. Operations sees a centralized management console (plane) that provides a way to monitor and manage multiple Docker Swarms running everywhere.

Well that’s about it for the update on Docker. There wasn’t much at the sessions on how containers access persistent storage but there’s a Flocker service that offers plugin support for EMC, NetApp and other enterprise SAN storage for Container apps. And there seem to be others out there and available.

You can read/hear more about Docker from these other CFD1 participants:

Comments

Full disclosure: Docker gave us a very nice/very long scarf, and two t-shirts decorated with Docker logo and tagline and a number of stickers and pins.