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federated clouds

Webinar Series On Federated Clouds And Marketplaces

Krishnan Subramanian · May 24, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Rishidot Research and 6fusion (Disclosure: Rishidot Research Client) are hosting a series of webinars talking about federated clouds, usecases, unit of compute, the notion of marketplaces and how they fit in, etc.. The first webinar in this series will be held on June 5th 2013 and the second webinar on June 26th 2013. The topic for the webinars are given below:

  • Federated Clouds, Agile IT and the Unit for Compute: In this webinar, we will discuss the notion of federated clouds, the business and technical benefits of federated clouds and the need to have an unit of compute which enables federated clouds and makes the consumption by enterprise IT friction-less. This webinar, presented by Krishnan Subramanian of Rishidot Research, will be held on June 5th 2013 at 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST.
  • Cloud Federation and Marketplaces – Smarter IT economics for the services world: In this follow up webinar, we will introduce the idea of marketplaces and talk about how it helps enterprise IT take advantage of better economics offered by such marketplaces and exchanges. This webinar, presented by Krishnan Subramanian along with executives from 6fusion and other industry luminaries, will be held on June 26th, 2013 at 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST.

You can register for these webinars using the form below and if you have any questions, please contact us.

If the above form doesn’t work, please click here for the registration form.

Position Paper: Open Source And Cloud Computing

Krishnan Subramanian · January 31, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Abstract:

Before the proliferation of cloud computing, open source software entered the enterprise IT helping them cut costs, avoid vendor lock- in and innovate on top of them. It democratized the enterprise software eventually leading to a newer operational model called cloud computing. As enterprises moved into a services based world, the natural question in everyone’s mind was about the usefulness of source code when everything from infrastructure to applications are offered as services. This report will critically examine this question

You can read the full paper below.

Open source and cloud computing from Rishidot Research

Download Link: http://www.slideshare.net/rishidot/open-source-and-cloud-computing

Cloud Brokers: Services versus Architecture

lmacvittie · September 6, 2012 · Leave a Comment

#ccevent #Cloud brokers and the difference between choice and connectivity

The notion of a cloud brokerage, of an intermediate service that essentially compares and ultimately chooses a cloud provider based on customer-specific parameters is not a new one. Many may recall James Urquhart‘s efforts around what he termed a "pCard" more than two years ago, an effort aimed at defining interfaces that would facilitate the brokering of services between competing clouds based on characteristics such as price, performance, and other delivery-related services.

As we look toward a future in which federated clouds play a larger and more impactful role, we necessarily must include the concept of a cloud service broker that can intermediate on our behalf to assist in the choice of which cloud will meet an application’s needs at any given time.

But we cannot overlook the growing adoption of hybrid clouds and the need to broker certain processes through systems over which the enterprise has control, such as identity management. The ability to broker – to intermediate – authentication and authorization for off-premise applications (SaaS) is paramount to ensuring access to corporate data stored externally is appropriately gated through authoritative identity systems and processes.

Doing so requires careful collaboration between enterprise and off-premise systems achieved through an architectural solution: cloud brokers.

Such brokers are architecturally focused in nature, not service-focused, and thus serve a different market and different purpose. One facilitates choice in a federated cloud ecosystem while the other enables the connectivity required to architect a hybrid cloud ecosystem.

Both cloud brokers and cloud service brokers will be key components in future architectures, but we should not conflate the two as they serve very different purposes despite their very similar nomenclature. 


I’ll be presenting "Bridges, Brokers, and Gateways: Exploring Hybrid Cloud Architectural Models" at Cloud Connect Chicago next week in which we’ll explore the notion of architectural brokers (as well as bridges and gateways) in more depth.

Position Paper: Value as a Service – The Second Generation Of Cloud

Krishnan Subramanian · August 27, 2012 · Leave a Comment

At Rishidot Research, we are talking about the future of cloud is more federated with value defined using different metrics than the first generation cloud metrics like ROI, agility, etc. This is a position paper introducing this idea to enterprise managers helping them with the rethink. This report was spearheaded by Lori MacVittie, Principal Analyst, Rishidot Research.

Abstract: The first generation of cloud computing offerings has focused on rapid, elastic provisioning of core resources: compute, network and storage. The second generation of offerings must look beyond these core resources to add value by addressing customer concerns beyond security.

Target Audience: Service Providers, ISVs

Total Pages: 5

Please use the link below to purchase the report. The link will take you to the secure e-commerce platform Fastspring which handles the checkout process. Once the payment is processed, the download link will be sent to your email inbox. Make sure to check your spam folder for the email,

The reprint rights of the report can be purchased by vendors who are Rishidot Research clients by using the credits available or by contacting us. More information on various plans available for vendors can be found in this page. This report is also available in our research library for the subscribers (see more about enterprise buyers plans here).

The Economics Of Federated Clouds

Krishnan Subramanian · August 13, 2012 · 1 Comment

I have long been talking about Federated Clouds and how it plays a significant role in meeting the needs of the market, especially enterprise customers. It not only meets the diverse needs of global users and regulatory requirements imposed by their local governments, it also acts as an antidote for natural market monopoly. This brief post will take a look into how federated cloud ecosystems change the economics of the cloud marketplace.

Conventional wisdom, mainly in the western nations, is based on the economics of scarcity which leads to the assumptions about consolidation in the market. Based on this conventional wisdom, pundits are busy predicting a consolidation in the cloud infrastructure market dominated by handful of players like AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc.. They usually quote electricity industry as an example and argue that we will see a similar pattern emerging in the IT services. However, the core unit of electrical power is the electron and it has fixed core attributes and it is not regulated by any government. Since electron is a fundamental particle, it was relatively easy to standardize in the electricity sector. The core unit of IT services is data and it doesn’t have a small set of fixed attributes like electron and, more importantly, it is governed by regulations of various types. This important difference makes the comparison with electricity industry a first order approximation and fails big when applied in the enterprise context. Another reason why consolidation was easy in non software sectors and early days of software industry was the lack of a concept like open source that lowered the barriers to entry and opened up the market for competition. With the advent and maturity of open source software in the last two decades, the underlying dynamics has shifted completely (in the software market) and we cannot apply the outdated economic models of pre-open source era any more. We need a new model based on the economics of abundance. Unlike the technology industry of the past (including traditional software industry), open source is part of the market from the very beginning of cloud computing. This opens up several interesting possibilities and the idea of federated clouds is one such possibility.

The natural question in the minds of industry watchers is the scaling ability of small service providers. If cloud is about elasticity, how can small providers meet the scaling needs of their customers. Let us be realistic here. At this point in time, there are very few users (like Netflix) who will need the scale offered by AWS or Google. The scaling needs of most of the workloads (especially in the enterprise) are limited and can be easily met by any provider of reasonable size. Also, most of the cloud platforms these days support interoperability and workload portability. Smaller providers can take advantage of this defining characteristic of cloud federation to offer the much needed elasticity for their users. This is not something new and this idea was put to use by the now defunct European cloud provider, ScaleUp technologies, few years back. There are other smaller cloud providers who are taking advantage of this ability to scale with cloud federation. This is the core of my federated cloud thesis and this brings into focus the economics of federated clouds.

As I previously mentioned, the economics of abundance brings in a completely different set of economic principles to the market. Unlike in the other model, we may not see the emergence of multi-billion dollar marketshare with one player having monopoly domination. Rather, we will see a more competitive market with varying levels of marketshare. Also, unlike in the case of handful of cloud providers thesis, the monetization is through multiple channels. In a consolidated cloud infrastructure market, service provider sell directly to the end customers needing access to their infrastructure whereas, in a federated cloud ecosystem, service providers not only sell to the end users but also to other service providers. This opens up more opportunities for higher order services like cloud brokers or marketplaces shifting the entire dynamics of the market. This idea has been emphasized by Antonio Celesti, et. al. in their paper Toward Cloud Federation: Concept and Challenges. Their paper also highlight another interesting aspect of the changed economics in federated clouds. Cloud federation, along with other advantages, helps service providers save their costs significantly by optimizing their operations by effectively taking advantage of federation during their lean times. Instead of keeping lights on in their datacenter to handle handful of workloads during their lean times, they can federate out to their partners in the federated cloud ecosystem and, thus, save considerable money in the process.

In short, the economics of federated cloud ecosystems are completely different from what we expect in a market driven by traditional economic forces. The changed economics levels the playing field for service providers by opening up newer opportunities and helps keep the market competitive (ultimately empowering the end users). In order to understand the idea of cloud federation, it is critical to understand how the economics of the market shifts with this model.

If you are an enterprise CIO or IT manager, you may also want to buy this premium report on the importance of cloud federation.

If you want to buy the reprint rights for this article, please contact us.

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