Book Image

Managing Microsoft Hybrid Clouds: RAW

By : Marcel van den Berg
Book Image

Managing Microsoft Hybrid Clouds: RAW

By: Marcel van den Berg

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Managing Microsoft Hybrid Clouds
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
9
Summary and a Look into the Near Future
Index

Barriers for the adoption of the public cloud


While cloud computing offers many advantages, there are also some barriers for adoption. Some of the top concerns organizations have when using cloud for their IT are:

  • Security

  • Loss of control

  • Compliance

  • Network

  • High availability

  • Inability to audit or examine

  • Vendor lock-in

Security is by far the biggest concern especially for organizations outside the United States. Who has access to my data when it is stored in the cloud? In 2013, we discovered that NSA had access to data in data centers of Microsoft and Google, for example. However, what about other tenants using the same shared infrastructure? What about firewalls and other security appliances? Are they safe? Can they be trusted?

Loss of control is another barrier many organizations see as a hurdle to take on their way to public cloud. All of a sudden, you no longer have physical access to your infrastructure. You cannot touch servers and storage. When something breaks, you have to wait and see whether the service provider is able to fix the issue within the limits as agreed in their Service Level Agreement. You have no means to prioritize actions or get extra people or the information needed to solve the issue faster. Basically, customers have to wait till the provider solves the issue. You may need inbuilt resiliency so that your workloads continue to run somewhere else.

Using public cloud services is only possible using network connections, mainly through the Internet. If the network connection fails, can I still have access to my critical applications? Many organizations are worried about this network dependency.

There have been quite a few outages of public cloud offerings; Amazon AWS had those and Microsoft Azure as well. A leap year bug brought down many Azure services on February 29, 2012. While cloud infrastructures are made highly redundant, when things go wrong, they go badly wrong. Customers are concerned about this. Luckily, some cloud providers are very open about causes of outages. They are willing to learn from mistakes and improve.

Many organizations, such as banks, are only allowed to outsource their IT services when an external auditing firm is allowed to audit the facilities and procedures. This means auditors need physical access to the data center facilities, which is often not allowed.

Microsoft agreed with De Nederlandsche Bank (Dutch central Supervisor for Banks) the right to examine. This means the staff of De Nederlandsche Bank is able to examine procedures of the Microsoft Azure infrastructure. It is also allowed to enter facilities of Microsoft to check if Microsoft indeed complies to policies.

Vendor lock-in is a situation in which a customer will find it very difficult in time, effort, or costs to move to another vendor. Basically, the consumer is involuntary tied to the vendor and has to accept price changes, less than wanted product innovation, or bad customer service. This is sometimes called the "Hotel California" mentality of cloud vendors. "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!", the lyrics of the famous song by The Eagles, an American rock band.

Cloud providers are very well aware of this and offer features that give the customer the freedom to move to other offerings.

Challenges of hybrid cloud

Besides the mentioned concerns or fears, there are some additional challenges of using cloud. This section will discuss some aspects of hybrid cloud and public cloud that an organization has to think about before moving to the cloud:

  • Control and ownership over data

  • Performance

  • Feature misalignment

  • Application compatibility with cloud platform

  • License mobility

  • Networking

Data is the main asset of each organization using IT. Without access to data, almost all organizations will sooner or later have serious difficulties in conducting business.

While many cloud vendors make sure data is replicated inside the same data center or even to other data centers, it is still stored on hardware owned by the provider. Also, there is just one logical copy of the data—one copy is not a backup. If the data gets corrupted, the replicas will be corrupted too.

So, every organization needs to make backups. This can be done by storing data on storage provided by the cloud vendor. However, it is still in the same environment run by the same vendor. So, it is better to have an offsite backup. This is a challenge. Not many cloud vendors, especially the larger ones, offer backup to removable media such as tape or external disks. Some software vendors have software that can transfer data between different clouds and an on-premises data center.

If the vendor does not support removable media handling, the only way to have an offsite backup is to transfer backup data over a wide area network to another location—preferably a location managed by another provider or a secondary on-premises location. This might add additional costs for network transfer costs. Microsoft, for example, charges for data leaving the Azure data center. There is no charge for data transfer into the data center.

Guaranteed performance is another challenge. In a multitenant infrastructure without proper measures, there is a risk of meeting the "noisy neighbor." A noisy neighbor is a process run by a single tenant that consumes so much resources that other tenants experience a degraded performance.

Think about a cloud tenant that runs a very IO-intensive database query once a month. As a cloud provider, you do not want other customers to suffer from that query. So, cloud providers need to make sure there is some sort of quality of service on especially storage and on networking.

In most cases, organizations that use hybrid cloud will discover that the features offered by their own on-premises virtual infrastructure are different than the ones offered in the public cloud. Advanced features such as the migration of virtual machines to another host, snapshots, changing virtual disk size, and so on are limited or nonexistent in many public cloud offerings. In the following chapters, we will find out the differences in management experience between on-premises Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure.

So, the integration of private and public cloud and establishing new procedures can be a challenge.

There is a difference in features of on-premises and public cloud, and the underlying virtual infrastructure is very likely to be different.

Basically, there are two architectures used in IaaS platforms: one designed on the principle that the application should deliver resiliency and one that has a lot of resiliency built into the platform.

Software licenses are many times tied to physical servers or CPUs. Vendors still need to do a lot of work to teach customers how licenses can be moved to a different infrastructure. So what if you move your Oracle license to a public cloud? Do you have to make sure that license covers all of the physical CPUs the licensed workload can potentially run on? In the following chapters, we will learn about the strategic partnering between Oracle and Microsoft and what this means for license mobility.

Hybrid cloud potentially allows the movement of workloads between on-premises infrastructures (not private cloud per se) and the public cloud. As explained before, hybrid cloud could be seen as a bridge. However, the network IP addresses used in the public cloud infrastructure will be different than the ones used on premise. Do we need to reconfigure IP addresses in the virtual machines when a virtual machine is moved? In the following chapters, we will learn about technology that enables workload mobility.

Later in this chapter, we will also discuss what happens if your organization needs to exit the cloud provider. However, what if your own organization goes bankrupt and all of the financial data is stored in the cloud? Who is going to pay the cloud provider to make that data available to organizations such as the tax bureau or the curator?