After attending last week’s All About the Cloud, Satish Shenoy shared a summary about the Successful Cloud Managing Strategies Breakout Session.
Moderator: John Rowell – CTO OpSource
Speakers: Sven Hammar, Mat Ellis, Jamal Mazhar, Ray Solnik
Topics Covered: Definition of Cloud Management, Who wins, Cloud Management Approach (one vs. multi vendor), Lessons learned, and Success stories (Bonus: Any favorite apps to share).
Discussion Points:
• What does Cloud Management mean to you?
o Ultimately it is about delivering good customer experience; It is about performance and cost; It is about monitoring, deployment, scalability, security, flexibility and elasticity while producing business enhancing results. The baseline definition of what is “secure”, what is “flexibility”, etc could vary based on customer segment (large enterprise vs. SMB)
• Who wins?
o Some companies are doing too much (e.g. Rightscale) so those companies might not be winners but it does depend on how you define a “winner” – Different people might have different definitions. If you look at the data center market, would you say IBM won? Or Computer Associates?
o We are all winners in this thing can could – some of us win by providing predictive analytics or “early warning system” to our clients; Others have other means to “win”
• Approach for cloud management – Go with one vendor who is a generalist or a point solution that is more customized (but with more than 1 vendor)?
o It really depends on the customer and what is important to them. Most customers will likely multiple vendors since it is hard for one vendor to do all things well in cloud management; The key is even with multiple vendors is to get the point solutions that can integrate well with other point solutions.
• What are the things to watch out in public cloud infrastructures?
o Five things – Cost, Waste, Sprawl, Overages and Compliance.
o Cost – Cloud is more expensive in certain areas (storage for instance)
o Waste & Sprawl – Don’t use what you pay for; need for financial controls
o Overages – Watch out for overruns/overages that add up quickly
o Compliance – Ensure compliance to company policy
• Share any success stories
o Slideshare – With a cloud solution, we enabled them to grow very quickly – Place all presentations on the web – and turn on capacity as needed
o Mint.com is another good example – what we have accomplished there – the users are the beneficiaries
• Any Favorite Apps to share
o Ray – Evernote, Dropbox
o Jamal – LinkedIn
o Mat – mint.com, craigslist
o Sven – Spotify
Heard at the session (Interesting Quotes):
• “Cloud Management has become clearly fuzzy” – John Rowell
• “It is important to understand economies of scale vs. economies of acting quickly” – Mat Ellis