Cloud broker is a nice buzz word that I have seen banded about a lot this year, so on that basis I thought i’d join the bandwagon and have a go at talking about them myself! Within this post I will give a high level overview of the “state of brokerage” today and then give you a few high level requirements I would want to acheive from an employed broker service.

So what are they

Brokers in the world of cloud computing, appear to be compared to how a Commodity stock broker works, with that broker purchasing cloud workloads based on factors such as supply and demand shortage or peak events that require large amounts of compute. Based on what the industry pundits or analysts are saying what a cloud broker actually is I fail to see hardly any evidence or practical use case to suggest this is the reality. One of the reasons I suspect that this is, is partly due to one of the big issues that is seen across all emergent supportive technologies and strategy relevant to cloud computing, which are;

• A lack of solid standard definition
• A lack of actually shipping a service or product that meets this standard definition.

Currently today though from my observation it seems that cloud computing brokers can be classed with some of the following definition;

• Teams that reside within an organisation who find you the best suitable environment and price for IT services, I guess you could say this is the likes of you and me still today,
• A system integrator or telecoms provider providing general sourcing of compute across partners or alliances,
• Or it could be a purchased or “aaS” software solution that goes and selects most appropriate set of inputted business objective such as service level/locale/price etc,

A personal view is that when I re-read this post in 1-2 years the above list of definition will probably have grown even bigger and more diverse. I beleive that the cloud broker will probably not evolve into being one thing, they will be defined as a series of tasks and processes that can be fulfilled in many shapes and forms to obtain best value. A comparative is how people perform vendor selection and procurement today for commodity based Items, some still source the best deal for there business using a dedicated team, some use reverse auctions to let “the mountain come to Mohamed” and some use external benchmarked pricing indexes to ensure they are getting a good price.

My Broker

So we have  established that the current definitions of a cloud broker is a bit wooly still, however lets take the issue of definition factor away and  I will delve into the charateristics that I would want a future cloud broker to be able to exhibit and do for my organisation. I’ve compiled a strawman below of some of the general questions that I would want to be answered or provided by using the “Cloud broker”:

Service availability

• Total figures for total actual Datacentre’s that a provider has on a per region/country basis,
• Capability to obtain information on total gross available compute workload within market cloud providers,
• Available compute over subscription levels that are potentially available for any targetted workloads,
• SLA service offerings, with these including a match to inputted translated business metric,
• Cloud provider contingency for any potential cloud datacentre failure,

Performance/capacity

• Ability to find the best throughput/network latency for cloud locations or point of presences based on my businesses location,
• Capable IOP metric, using a industry standard benchmark tools such as Swing bench or IOMeter,
• Load testing results from industry benchmark tool,
• Archival capability, along with associated prices,

Automation/Management

• VM deployment times,
• VM potential burst scenario time, this needs to be something I can simulate,
• Monitoring presentation method,
• API Architecture,
• Portability capability, could be in the shape and form of VM file format, service interfaces etc,

Commercial

• My best available offered price for compute, storage, network costs,
• In a similar way to how we search best price on hotels/flights, I would want a broker to do this for comparison of compute, storage and networking cost,
• Trended pricing metric, i.e. I want to see how much a cloud provider has either raised or reduced pricing over its history,
• VM standard image sizing, to equate my storage cost,
• Block size of formatted storage, to again equate my storage growth overhead,
• CDMI support,

Service provider/customer references

• Provider quoted service reputation weighting, i.e. based on existing customer feedback, reviews, general service perception,
• An independent service review search, I want to be able to obtain underwritten third party written advice and compare against what the vendor actually says,

Generally a broker will have at least a minimal price associated to either the software or people doing the brokerage on your behalf, based on this I would expect my broker to have the following important charateristics,

• Added value to my business other than just taking the commission,
• Removing the sales bombardment that we all loathe,
• Most importantly, taking accountability by under writing any actions that are brokered for me (controversial one that),

Summary

Above are just some of the charateristics I can think of being relevant for a business today, as cloud computing evolves and the technology matures I am sure more will appear and become relevant. Items i’ve compiled would no doubt today go into an RFI/P, maybe as I have predicted before on the dissolve of RFI/P, the cloud brokerage service will abolish the RFI/P with a replacement being a more efficient process that has the immediate business logic input.

Some of the quoted content may already exist, and some you may think are exceptionally all quite eccentric ideas, but I would hope that  has given you food for thought in trying to establish the true definition of a cloud broker is.

You may have noticed that I have just recently added an advertisement for Train Signal CBT http://www.trainsignal.com.

To be honest I’m not one for advertising single vendors, however with an organisation who has a core business of training I am more than happy to spread the good word on the Blog about their offerings and material.  Having been mentored by some great leaders in my time, over the years they have taught me the fundamental benefits of ensuring that a team is fully trained and has a standardised skill set for technology within the responsible areas of IT.

Also I have most certainly been taught that it is important to contiunally invest and develop employees to get the most out of them and ensure that they provide great value to the service delivery given to your business.

Trainsignal are not just a one stop for VMware based training, they offer a broad range of technology portfolio for all levels of skill and ability, these include;

• VMware
• Microsoft Server, Windows and Office technologies
• Cisco
• CompTIA
• CWNA

For a full comprehensive list please view http://www.trainsignal.com/Computer-Training.aspx, they also have to delivery this training some really really savvy IT trainers, all with many years experience and large volumes of qualifications against his or hers name!

All training is completely computer based with full online access to the material to access anywhere, this could be excellent if you are a travelling consultant and on the road stuck in a hotel room at night or you just want to be able to sit the laptop on your lap in the evenings and learn some new real cool stuff about the latest and greatest technologies at your own pace its all great stuff for this.

I personally endorse train signal, I have checked out the VMware training and will also be going through when I get time, the Exchange 2010 product training material.

So have a look and check out the material, they even offer a 90 day money back guarantee if you are not satisfied!

I thought I would feedback a review of my recent trip to VMworld with a certain Sweet and Sour affair, come on lets face it every IT event/conference has at least some Sour or bad moments so don’t go saying i’m a grump or a whinger I will keep the pointers short and to the point;

I’ll start with the Sweet…

Sweet

Venue

The venue and event management this year was second to none compared to my other Five previous VMworld US/Europe events, the venue although rather confusing at the start really did have a good amount of space to roam, great coffee facilities, great breakfast facilities with there being always something at least to scoff.

Event wise the logistics of getting 6000 geeks and also additional partners, booth babes and egos into such a small part of a town must be immense, the free Metro travel ticket really was a very good idea and that was way much better than just giving me a coach to squeeze on and off of each day.

Food in the venue was in my view tolerable for such a large event, its hard to cater for such a broad range of fussy eaters (yes @vmackem i mean you ….Although one exception to this were two kind german visitors to the event who kindly sat down in @vmackem and myself’s chair while we were digging in to the buffet..needless to say we didn’t quite fancy eating with someone as rude to do that in the first place and not at least offer to bugger off!

Social media

This is quite obviously huge in todays world of Twitter, facebook and any other medium thats reachable to 16-65 year olds! John Troyer really did lay on a fantastic amount of facility in the Bloggers lounge and every time I went round there he was doing an interview on his VMworld TV booth, shame we didn’t get to really catch up in full.

Suggestion to John on this one would be to maybe provide the interviews in downloadable format for Mobile devices?

People People and more People

Networking is a key benefit of VMworld and it was great to meet some people with real world experiences, problems and strategic views on what is happening within the world of Infrastructure. It was great to meet also some of the VMware team and other key vendor moguls face to face, I rarely get this opportunity so thanks.

Meet the CTO (vExperts only)

This was a great gesture by Steve Herrod to the vExperts, I can imagine after an absolute shocker of a day for someone of such statue and level to be able to do this for an hour or so it was a great touch. Not being able to completely comment on how busy and hectic a CTO must get at these events I can imagine it was hard to slip in. I think a lot of the technical hands on vExperts (and imposters) got more value out of this however I really did appreciate being with both Steve and other vExperts so I can’t thank both Steve and John Troyer enough.

Sours

Now the sours, yes I know but it is hard for me to at least give some positive critism to feedback, I have been to Five VMworlds in the past so I’ve seen a lot of change, in 2006 Vmware was not on the Stock market, Virtualisation strategy was a mere fly in the Ointment that is IT infrastructure compared to today and they had far less product set to base content on.

Marketing marketing oh and more marketing

This is quite a critical one and one that I am sure most people I walked about with or sat in sessions with would agree with. It’s difficult to cater for everyone at such an event but to me giving an introduction of a product for 25% of the session before actually starting to hear the real presentation I went to attend was a bit annoying.

Lack of real world response

Maybe I am too bleeding edge when it comes to looking at newer technologies such as vCD, Horizon and others however I found that anyone questions on vCD really was able to give me the answers I wanted and I felt I was getting more or less a generic set of answers. I go to VMworld to obtain pertinent information that I can align to my business, additionally my organisation spend large amounts of money and has given VMworld Five days out of my busy work schedule to obtain this information, if I cannot go back to my org and give them information then unfortunately its a losing battle to be able to attend future events.

Solutions Exchange

I got very little value from this part of the show, vendor stands seemed very generic and the marketing engine seemed to be in full force. Large amounts of presenters seemed to either be tape recorders or drop outs from QVC presenter school, I think I must have seen about a handful of vendors using people to present with absolutely zero consideration or knowledge of what they were presenting on. This works for an online video or product overview but not face to face I’m afraid however good looking they may well have been!

Summary

So another year another VMworld and now I have the even harder bit of collating all this information and putting into an aligned organisational strategic roadmap….

Hi All,

I’ll be off on route to Vmworld europe tomorrow for a Four day schedule full of all things Cloud and Virtualisation. Dependent on how busy I am during the week I will  attempt to do a few blogs on views/opinions/myth debunks throughout what sessions and conversations I have, also I have a zero marketing tolerance policy so expect no false marketing!

So if you see me and have read my blog/tweets, please do either say hello, nod, shake my hand or punch me in the face..ok maybe not the last one.

Dan

Ok so I am no ITIL practitioner, however I have over my small amount of years in the industry been exposed to a large volume of both internal and externally driven IT Change freezes. Change freezes in the Cloud Computing world I think are going to transform in a very big way. When thinking about Change and how this is going to work in the new generation Cloud I’m lost on what dramatic force Cloud delivery models will have on the traditional change freezes that occur at the festive period…I do have some views to share so I have compiled this post to articulate them.

Nostrildamus begins his prediction

So lets start, my first view is that if change freezes are not dissolving already today within Infrastructure landscapes that embrace the new wave of Cloud computing methodologies then they most certainly will do over the next 5-10 Years. To explain why I think this, I will break down a few simple reasons. My views focus on changes that occur within the Infrastructure layer or more aptly IaaS, I do not discuss other layers of a cloud computing stack such as PaaS and SaaS layers.

Public Cloud

Infrastructure environments within this area include a consumer base that generate the  most profit and revenue at the typical festive freeze period and in turn actually demand more Infrastructure capacity and dynamic growth. It is the biggest time for actually growing customer base, consumers will buy the most endpoint devices that connect to the services hosted on IaaS i.e. Internet, Smartphones. Also anyone who is an existing customer will use more services during the busy period, so I think you’ve got my drift that “were gona need a helluva a lot more power captain”.

This large demand for consumer cloud compute to support the larger influx of end user population usage, designing for this peak demand in public cloud service is not something that can be forecasted as well as some would like, and without doubt it is the area of Cloud computing that makes use of the emergent “Cloud bursting” under high utilisation peaks.

My view is that “Cloud burst” cannot be achieved when stringent change freezes are imposed on the IT landscape that operates it, cloud burst does not introduce change per se, however it merely increases the logical resources that run on top of physical devices which to someone whom is within a non Cloud mindset would assume this is a change and in turn may effect running production.

Architecture within a private cloud needs to be highly available and able to sustain any potential outages upon underlying architecture, this may be provided by either Infrastructure level technology or by the running application being able to scale accordingly across stateless nodes. This highly available service driven environment enables a potential of being able to reduce the need to freeze any changes, however this process needs to be completely invisable to end users and responsible custodians of the relevant environments.

Verdict - Change Freezes that may be imposed on landscapes supporting Consumer Cloud will be the first that gradually dissolve, in some businesses they may have no choice!

On premise virtualised and automated shared pool of resource – Also known as “Private Cloud”

You may notice that I have not named this delivery model as ”Private Cloud”, today most organisations mainly just have a private on premise virtualised and automated shared pool of resource, and are not yet at the holy grail stage of the “Private Cloud”. Unless an organisation who is working towards adopting a private cloud was extremely efficient before adopting the cloud strategy, it is more than likely that a strategy of Private cloud is not anywhere close to achieving the same level of decouplement, fluidity and efficiency as a typical IaaS based public cloud service do when introducing change and performing service fulfillment.

Changes at festive periods within a Private organisation also exist due to lack of staff resourcing, will the touted benefits of hands off automation and workflow for service fulfillment being allocated from a pool of resource really need to warrant or be subjected to change freezes? You could argue that as with public based cloud services cloud burst or service fulfillment through a web portal for end user requests is not a change so that relevant project or business activity would not need to schedule around a change freeze.

Unfortunately though, with the lack of full maturity of Private cloud in most organisations I expect that this means change freezes are going to certainly have more shelf life than consumer or public clouds with the main reasons being due to the way that service management  teams internally are still acutely aware of the Infrastructure landscape that operates the service currently touted as Cloud.

In most shops the complete underlying Infrastructure has not yet transformed into the new architectural design model that is orchestrated and workflow driven. Change freezes and other related process won’t be able to dissolve until the services and potential service disruption is completely invisable to the end user whom is either a user or responsible for the underlying Infrastructure landscape.

Verdict - Change Freezes within internally operated environments will take far longer to fade than public based clouds due to the legacy it will need to transform away from.

An off premise hosted virtualised and automated shared pool of resource - Also known as “Private off premise, Hybrid or Private cloud”

Ok this form of cloud delivery is introduced in the same sarcastic way as i’ve used with describing the on premise cloud and this is mainly due to again a lack of maturity. As with Private on premise cloud, this area of IT service delivery is currently at an early stage of adoption by most Service Providers and is at the early stage of being moved into core portfolio offerings for customers. Service Providers see Cloud models as the next big opportunity to streamline and make up for the lost ground and revenue made within the Virtualisation era so the future vision to make outsourced hosted environments “Cloud” based will most certainly become the de facto.

As with Private on premise based Infrastructure pools, potential Change freeze fade within the Service Provider world are also very much based on first the level of maturity that the SP has for service fulfillment and automation. and secondly and more importantly, having the capability to operate effective multi-tenancy and a complete decouplement of a shared resource pools between customers, and don’t forget this is not limited to Server workloads, this is relevant across the complete IT hardware stack end to end.

Again resourcing is a reason for change freezes within hosted environments, this also waterfalls down to the plethora of sub contractors and contractors that the incumbent supplier would use for customers. If the future of cloud is to be a self service based affair from shared resources why would the engagement and fulfillment process that is experienced today within outsourcer’s need to exist and be limited over festive change periods in years to come? I suspect a large legacy of people within organisations will still remain, and at the end of the day customers like to know they are getting value for money by a physical bod fulfilling either design or build.

Verdict - Until Service Providers completely make underlying environments that support customer workloads and services completely invisible, Change freezes will still exist within this model. Additionally Outsource providers have a much larger broad range of diverse customer requirements which cannot be transformed globally overnight, this will reduce the time that examples processes such as Change freezes take to dissolve.

Post Summary

Hopefully I have articulated well enough to you to justify why I think Change freeze days are numbered within a Cloud based world.  Timeframes of this likely occurring is way over 5-10 Years and this will mainly be due to a legacy and generation of practices that have been implemented into organisations and also a an existing Infrastructure that is not yet capable of delivering new additions or new changes in a non disruptive manor.

Also lastly, in order to succeed in providing non disruptive service to your business you will need to either first write off financially your existing assets/agreements or find a way of actually funding an Infrastructure landscape capable of supporting a Cloud, something that unfortunately most companies will be limited too for many years to come.