Cloud Computing and IT Ops. The Development/Ops mashup.

In the JEE world in many shops there has usually been a wall between the IT Ops departments and the internal  Software Development departments. The process is usually as follows:

- An internal engineering team develops a great application.
- If the engineering team has good project management skills, they involve IT Ops early in the development process.
- IT Ops provides engineering with resources necessary to run the application in development, staging and production environments.
- The engineering team and IT Ops team agree on a deployment methodology.
- The IT Ops team uses a monitoring solution.
- And so on.

This common interaction framework is based on one simple rule: IT Ops provides engineering with defined, limited resources for a project. IT Ops provides 4, 6, 8, etc servers to run the application. Even with the advent of virtualization the framework remains the same. Instead of servers, IT just provides VMs. Yet, IT still controls how many VMs to provide and what resources should be in those VMs.

This is going to change with Cloud Computing. The Cloud Computing concept of elasticity turns the resource management practices of an IT Ops department on its head. Elasticity is the ability to increase computing power in the form of more servers, more storage, etc dynamically, by the application running in the infrastructure.

Pure elasticity will mean that engineers developing an enterprise application will decide how many resources their application will use at any time. This decision could be implemented in the form of an algorithm calculating necessary memory and CPU according to transaction times, or according to number of users. The application will decide by itself how many servers to use, and it will contract and expand dynamically.

Then, how does an IT Ops department manage resources? All of the sudden, they don't know what resources will be used by which application.  One obvious solution will be to implement pods, a silo of resources that limit the maximum resources a set of application can consume. Yet, to fully get the ROI from a Cloud infrastructure, a company can't create silos. You want idle resources in other silos to not be waisted.

If Cloud Computing becomes the predominant platform in the enterprise, elasticity will change a long standing division of responsibilities and functions. Maybe this factor alone will slow the adoption of internal Clouds in big IT shops. That, and the fact that there are very few vendors that can actually implement a EC2 like Cloud environment.

Comments

[j]

Just because resources are elastic doesn't mean that they don't need to be monitored, measured, and planned for.

If being elastic means you can deploy "servers" on-demand, then did the procurement/approval system just get yanked out of the CFO's hands?

Most likely not, those resources and costs need to be tracked and planned for, under a smaller time window than they have before. Expect Ops to do that.

Until *every* piece of your infrastructure can take advantage of clouds, there will still be parts of your application(s) that might have to live in-house and yet work with the part that are in the clouds. Ops will manage that coordination.

Clouds are just like any other resource, with costs and constraints.

So capacity planning is still just as important in the cloud, and ops will probably handle that.

[Hugo Troche]

j, thank you for posting. The question is at what level will OPS be involved in resource allocation. Of course they will be involved in deciding the resource allocation for the entire cloud. But, when it comes to individual applications, how will they budget? Will they use a internal utility computing billing system? That seems too complicated.

With elasticity implemented in internal clouds, the process of budgeting for an application is different.

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