Last month our team attended the CloudConnect 2021 conference. The first day of the conference included several workshop summits. We sponsored the Cloud Performance workshop summit and exhibited on the expo floor. Our goal was to better assess the needs of the market and validate our dreams with actual cloud consumers. The cloud performance summit was a great opportunity for cloud consumers to learn more how to best provision an on-demand online service, with scalability in respect to both availability and performance.

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The Cloud Service Level Agreement (SLA) discussion puts penalties and compensations on the table. Can we say that the compensation method the customer expects is the same as the Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor’s SLA provides? 

A while ago, I experienced issues while starting up a specific instance on Amazon AWS cloud. I’m still not sure why, but the instance entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment work (installation and configuration of a service) we did on it for about two weeks just went down the drain. Discussion with the Amazon AWS support team ended with an escalation of the support request to their head of support. 

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Clouds move fast, and change fast.  The advantage is having elastic, fast, and un-planned deployments. However, uncontrolled usage leads very quickly into footprint sprawl – cloud sprawl, overspend and unpredictable behavior.  Contrary to VM sprawl, where the virtualization environment provides natural containment, cloud sprawl can be rather chaotic and expensive – exactly for the same reasons we enumerated above: lack of visibility and control, unpredictability, new processes, and different practices.

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In the last year I have had the privilege of meeting lots of companies that take advantage of the public IaaS capabilities. While most of the companies are already using Amazon AWS, unfortunately, I see many IT leaders that are having bad experiences with Amazon AWS resources sprawling out across their organizations, resulting in increased uncertainty of the monthly cost. It’s a fact that cost is becoming a sore point in the cloud adoption phase, so instead of opting for a smart and planned process, the bad experience leads the IT leader to return to the “good old” “old and good” environment and simply buy new servers.

It seems that the decision makers have accepted that cloud computing leads to lower IT cost. Although many experience savings while switching to the cloud, the total cost of ownership for most is still too high. So before you go and spend more money on additional monitoring and management systems, here are some tips to help you regain control and reduce costs immediately.

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According to Gartner’s report “Reimagining IT: The 2011 CIO Agenda”, almost half of all CIOs expect to adopt cloud technologies within the next five years. Not surprisingly Gartner’s analysts expect an extreme increase from 3% to 43% of the IT organizations that will run applications in the cloud. No doubt that most of the IT organizations already adopted SaaS, IaaS adoption is evolving rapidly and PaaS gain momentum.

 “CIOs recognize that they need to reposition themselves and IT to support enterprise innovation and growth. However, two issues stand in their way: benefits realization (the achievement of business benefits) and IT skills. Skills are an issue because CIOs rely on bringing skills in from the outside whenever they need to get work done (see figure below). Both issues will prevent IT from reaching full potential unless the CIO addresses them” 

Gartner report - Reimagining IT:The 2011 CIO Agenda

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Cloud providers consolidate access to many consumers’ data, or should we say victims’ data into a single point of (hacking) entry. Recently,  the major popular clouds have increasingly become the focus of attacks by hackers. IT organizations may think that their legal liability can be outsourced, but total misconception. The contract with the IaaS vendors includes security obligations, however it does not negat the liability of the software vendor as the responsible party. So rather than focusing on contracts and limiting liability in cloud services deals, the SaaS vendor must focus on controls and audit-ability.

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Traditionally delivering high availability often meant replicating everything. However, today with the option of going to the cloud we can say that providing two of everything is costly. High availability should be planned and achieved at several different levels: including the software, the data center and the geographic redundancy.

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The practice of shaping demand to fit the available resources can be found for example in transportation businesses, where airlines charges more for their service when demand is high and charge less to encourage more demand. In the real-time and interactive on-line world,  the challenge is to ensure that capacity meets demand.

The following diagram shows 3 cases of over capacity, under capacity and on demand capacity, which the latter can be achieved only by taking an advantage of the cloud elasticity.

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In the first part we presented some basic concepts and an overview of cloud capacity management. cloud capacity discussion has two main aspects:

1 - Infrastructure capacity management by the IaaS vendor to plan capacity of the cloud data-center to optimize utilization and decrease operations costs.

2 - Cloud resources consumption by the cloud consumers  (any IT organization such as a SaaS vendor) including planning capacity demand in order to achieve efficient consumption of the purchased cloud resources. In this part we will discuss this aspect.

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Capacity planning is described by Wikipedia as the “process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products.” It is also given by the following formula:

(number of machines or workers) × (number of shifts) × (utilization) × (efficiency)

The IT capacity plan is derived from the current and future resources utilization for holding, storing and accommodating the software services. It is a given fact that servers’ average utilization in the traditional data center is between 5% and 20%. By contract, when planning capacity in the cloud, the basic working assumption is that, utilization should match the demand at all times and support temporary demand peaks and future trends.

In his CIO’s article about cloud computing capacity, Bernard Golden wrote,

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