We’ll hear now from an IT
industry analyst about what causes unwieldy cloud use, and how new tools,
processes, and methods are bringing insights and actionable analysis to regain
control over hybrid IT sprawl.
Here to help us explore new
breeds of hybrid and multicloud management solutions is Rhett
Dillingham, Vice President and Senior Analyst at Moor Insights
and Strategy. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner,
Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile
app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What makes hybrid and multicloud adoption so complex?
Dillingham: Regardless
of how an enterprise has invested in public and private cloud use for the last
decade, a lot of them ended up in a similar situation. They have a footprint on
at least one or multiple public clouds. This is in addition to their private
infrastructure, in whatever degree that private infrastructure has been cloud-enabled
and turned into a cloud API-available infrastructure to their developers.
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| Dillingham |
They have this footprint then across
the hybrid infrastructure and multiple public clouds. Therefore, they
need to decide how they are going to orchestrate on those various
infrastructures -- and how they are going to manage in terms of control costs,
security, and compliance. They are operating cloud-by-cloud, versus operating
as a consolidated group of infrastructures that use common tooling. This is the
real wrestling point for a lot of them, regardless of how they got here.
Gardner: Where
are we in this as an evolution? Are things going to get worse before they get
better in terms of these levels of complexity and heterogeneity?
Dillingham: We’re
now at the point where this is so commonly recognized that we are well into the
late majority of adopters of public cloud. The vast majority of the market is
in this situation. We’re going to get worse from an enterprise market
perspective.
We are also at the inflection
point of requiring orchestration tooling, particularly with the advent of containers.
Container orchestration is getting more mature in a way that is ready for broad
adoption and trust by enterprises, so they can make bets on that technology and
the platforms based on them.
Control issues
On the
control side, we’re still in the process of sorting out the tooling. You have a
number of vendors innovating in the space, and there have been a number of
startup efforts. Now, we’re seeing more of the historical infrastructure
providers invest in the software capabilities and turning those into services
-- whether it’s Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE),
VMware, or
Cisco,
they are all making serious investments into the control aspect of hybrid IT.
That’s because their value is private cloud but extends to public cloud with
the same need for control.
Gardner: You
mentioned containers, and they provide a common denominator approach so that you
can apply them across different clouds, with less arduous and specific work than
deploying without containerization. The attractiveness of containers comes
because the private cloud people aren’t going to help you deal with your public
cloud deployment issues. And the public clouds aren’t necessarily going to help
you deal with other public clouds or private clouds. Is that why containers are
so popular?
Dillingham: If
you go back to the fundamental basis of adoption of cloud and the value
proposition, it was first and foremost about agility -- more so than cost efficiency.
Containers are a way of extending that value, and getting much deeper into speed
of development, time to market, and for innovation and experimentation.
Containerization is an
improvement geared around that agility value that furthers cloud adoption. It
is not a stark difference from virtual machines (VMs), in the sense of how the
vendors support and view it.
So, I think a different angle
on that would be that the use of VMs in public cloud was step one, containers was
a significant step two that comes with an improved path to the agility and
speed value. The value the vendor ecosystem is bringing with the platforms -- and
how that works in a portable way across hybrid infrastructures and multi-cloud --
is more easily delivered with containers.
There’s going to be an enterprise
world where orchestration runs specific to cloud infrastructure, public versus
private, but different on various public clouds. And then there is going to be
more commonality with containers by virtue of the Kubernetes project and Cloud Native Computing
Foundation (CNCF) portfolio.
That’s going to deliver for
new applications -- and those lifted and shifted into containers -- much more
seamless use across these hybrid infrastructures, at least from the control
perspective.
Gardner: We
seem to be at a point where the number of cloud options has outstripped the
ability to manage them. In a sense, the cart is in front of the horse; the
horse being hybrid cloud management. But we are beginning to see more such management
come to the fore. What does this mean in terms of previous approaches to
management?
In other words, a lot of
organizations already have management for solving a variety of systems heterogeneity
issues. How should the new forms of management for cloud have a relationship
with these older management tools for legacy IT?
Dillingham: That
is a big question for enterprises. How much can they extend their existing
toolsets to public cloud?
A lot of the vendors from the
private [infrastructure] sector invested in delivering new management
capabilities, but that isn’t where many started. I think the rush to adoption
of public cloud -- and the focus on agility over cost-efficiency -- has driven
a predominance of the culture of, “We are going to provide visibility and
report and guide, but we are not going to control because of the business value
of that agility.”
The
tools have grown up as a delivery on visibility but not the control of
the typical enterprise private infrastructure approach, which is set up
for a disruptive orientation to the software and not continuity.
Gardner: You mentioned
both agility and cost as motivators for going to hybrid cloud, but do we get to
the point where the complexity and heterogeneity spawn a lack of insight and
control? Do we get to the point where we are no longer increasing agility? And
that means we are probably not getting our best costs either.
Are we at a point where the
complexity is subverting our agility and our ability to have predictable
total costs?
Growing up in the cloud
Dillingham: We are
still a long away from maturity in effective use of cloud infrastructure. We
are still at a point where just understanding what is optimal is pretty difficult
across the various purchase and consumption options of public cloud by provider
and in comparing that to an accurate cost model for private infrastructure. So,
the tooling needs to be in place to support this.
There has been a lot of discussion
recently about HPE OneSphere from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where they have
invested in delivering some of this comparability and the analytics to enable better
decision-making. I see a lot of innovation in that space -- and that’s just the
tooling.
There is also the management of the services, where the cloud managed service provider market is continuing
to develop beyond just a brokering orientation. There is more value now in
optimizing an enterprise’s footprint across various cloud infrastructures on
the basis of optimal agility. And also creating value from services that can differentiate
among different infrastructures – be it Amazon Web Services (AWS) versus Azure,
and Google,
and so forth – and provide the cost comparisons.
Gardner: Given
that it’s important to show automation and ongoing IT productivity, are these new
management tools including new levels of analytics, maybe even predictive
insights, into how workloads and data can best become fungible -- and moved
across different clouds -- based on the right performance and/or cost metrics?
Is that part of the
attractiveness to a multi- and cross-cloud management capability? Does hybrid
cloud management become a slippery slope toward impressive analytics and/or
performance-oriented automation?
Dillingham: We’ve
had investment in the tooling from the cloud providers, the software providers,
and the infrastructure providers. Yet the insights have come more from the
professional services’ realm than they have from the tooling realm. That’s
provided a feedback loop that can now be applied across hybrid- and multi-cloud
in a way that hasn’t come from the public cloud provider tools themselves.
So, where I see the most
innovation is from the providers that are trying to address multi-cloud
environments and best feed innovation from their customer engagements from
professional services. I like the opportunity HPE has to benefit from their
acquisitions of Cloud
Technology Partners and RedPixie, and then feeding those
insights back into [product development]. I’ve seen a lot of examples about the
work they’re doing in HPE OneSphere in moving those insights into action for
customers through analytics.
Gardner: I was
also thinking about the Nimble
acquisition, and with InfoSight, and the opportunity for
that intellectual property to come to bear on this, too.
Dillingham: Yes,
which is really harvesting the value of the control and insights of the private
infrastructure and the software-defined orientation of private infrastructure
in comparison to the public cloud options.
Gardner: Tell
us about Rhett Dillingham. You haven’t been an IT industry analyst forever.
Please tell us a bit about your background.
Dillingham: I’ve
been a longtime product management leader. I started in hardware, at AMD, and
moved into software. Before the cloud days, I was at Microsoft. Next I was building
out the early capabilities at AWS, such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Block Store
(EBS). Then I went into a portfolio of services at Rackspace, building
those out at the platform level and the overall Rackspace public cloud. As the
value of OpenStack
matured into private use, I worked with a number of enterprises on private OpenStack
cloud deployments.
As an analyst, I support project
management-oriented, consultative, and go-to-market positioning of our clients.
Gardner: Let’s
dwell on the product management side for a bit. Given that the market is still
immature, given what you know customers are seeking for a hybrid IT end-state,
what should vendors such as HPE be doing in order to put together the right set
of functions, processes, and simplicity -- and ultimately, analytics and
automation -- to solve the mess among cloud adoption patterns and sprawl?
Clean up the cloud mess
Dillingham: We
talked about automation and orchestration, talked about control of cost,
security, and compliance. I think that there is a tooling and services spectrum
to be delivered on those. The third element that needs to be brought into the process
is the control structure of each enterprise, of what their strategy is across
the different infrastructures.
Where are they optimizing on
cost based on what they can do in private infrastructure? Where are they
setting up decision processes? What incremental services should be adopted?
What incremental clouds should be adopted, such as what an Oracle
and an IBM
are positioning their cloud offerings to be for adoption beyond what’s already
been adopted by a client in AWS, Google, and Azure?
The
third element that needs to be brought into the process is the control
structure of each enterprise, of what their strategy is across the
different infrastructures.
Gardner: One
of the things that I struggle with, Rhett, is not just the process, the
technology and the opportunity, but the people. Who in a typical enterprise IT
organization should be tasked with such hybrid IT oversight and management? It
involves more than just IT.
To me, it’s economics, it’s
procurement, it’s contracts. It involves a bit more than red light, green light
… on speed. Tell me about who or how organizations need to change to get the
right people in charge of these new tools.
Who’s in charge?
Dillingham: More than
the individuals, I think this is about the recognition of the need for
partnerships between the business units, the development organizations, and the
operational IT organization’s arm of the enterprise.
The focus on agility for
business value had a lot of the cloud adoption led by the business units and
the application development organizations. As the focus on maturity mixes in
the control across security and compliance, those are traditional realms of the
IT operational organization.
Now there’s the need for
decision structure around sourcing -- where how they value incremental
capabilities from more clouds and cloud providers is a decision of tradeoffs
and complexity. As you were mentioning, of weighing between the incremental
value of an additional provider and an incremental service, and portability
across those.
What I am seeing in the most
mature setups are partnerships across the orientations of those organizations.
That includes the acknowledgment and reconciliation of those tradeoffs in long-term
portability of applications across infrastructures – against the value of adoption
of proprietary capabilities, such as deeper cognitive machine learning (ML) automation
and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, which are some of the drivers of the
more specific public cloud platform uses.
Gardner: So
with adopting cloud, you need to think about the organizational implications
and refactor how your business operates. This is not just bolting on a cloud
capability. You have to rethink how you are doing business across the board in
order to take full advantage.
Dillingham: There
is wide recognition of that theme. It gets into the nuts and bolts as you adopt
a platform and you determine exactly how the operations function and roles are
going to be defined. It means determining who is going to handle what, such as how
much you are going to empower developers to do things themselves. With the
accountability that results, more tradeoffs are there for them in their roles.
But it's almost over-rotation and focus to that out of recognition of it and
lack of valuation of that more senior-level decision making in what their cloud
strategy is.
I hear a lot of cloud
strategies that are as simple as, “Yes, we are allowing and empowering adoption
of cloud by our development teams,” without the second-level recognition of the
need to have a strategy for what the guidelines are for that adoption – not in
the sense of just controlling costs, but in the sense of: How do you view the
value of long-term portability? How do you value strategic sourcing and the ability
to negotiate across these providers long-term with evidence and demonstrable
portability of your application portfolio?
Gardner: In
order to make those proper calls on where you want to go with cloud and to what
degree, across which provider, organizations like HPE are coming up with new
tools.
So we have heard about HPE OneSphere.
We are now seeing HPE’s GreenLake
Hybrid Cloud, which is a use of HPE OneSphere management as a
service. Is that the way to go? Should we think of cloud management oversight
and optimization as a set of services, rather than a product or a tool? It
seems to me that a set of services, with an ecosystem behind them, is pretty
powerful.
A three-layer cloud
Dillingham: I
think there are three layers to that. One is the tool, whether that is consumed
as software or as a service.
Second is the professional
consultative services around that, to the degree that you as an enterprise need
help getting up to speed in how your organization needs to adjust to benefit
from the tools and the capabilities the tools are wrangling.
And then third is a decision
on whether you need an operational partner from a managed service provider
perspective, and that's where HPE is stepping up and saying we will handle all
three of these. We will deliver your tools in various consumption models on
through to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model, for example, with HPE
OneSphere. And we will operate the services for you beyond that SaaS control
portal into your infrastructure management, across a hybrid footprint, with the
HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud offering. It is very compelling.
HPE is stepping up with OneSphere and saying they will handle delivery of tools, SaaS models, and managed cloud services -- all through a control portal.
We have talked about the
vendors; we understand the market pretty well. But what should the end-user
organizations be starting to do and think in order for them to be prepared to take
advantage of these tools? What should be happening inside your development,
your DevOps, and that larger overview of process and organization in order to
say, “Okay, we’re going to take advantage of that hockey player when they are
ready, so that we can really come together and be proficient as a cloud-first
organization?”
Commit to an action plan
Dillingham: You
need to have a plan in place for each element we have talked about. There needs
to be a plan in place for how you are maturing your toolset in cloud-native
development… how you are supporting that on the development side from a continuousintegration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) perspective; how you are
reconciling that with the operational toolset and the culture of operating in a
DevOps model with whatever degree of iterative development you want to enable.
Is the tooling in place from
an orchestration and development capability and operations perspective, which
can be containers or not? And that gets into container orchestration and the
cloud management platforms. There is the control aspect. What tooling you are
going to apply there, how you are going to consume that, and how much you want
to provide it as a consultative offer? And then how much do you want those
options managed for you by an operational partner? And then how you are going
to set up your decision-making structure internally?
Every element of that is where
you need to be maturing your capabilities. A lot of the starting baseline for
the consultative value of a professional services partner is walking you
through the decision-making that is common to every organization on each of
those fronts, and then enabling a deep discussion of where you want to be in 3,
5, or 10 years, and deciding proactively.
More importantly than
anything, what is the goal? There is a lot of oversimplification of what the
goal is – such as adoption of cloud and picking of best-of-breed tools -- without
a vision yet for where you want the organization to be and how much it benefits
from the agility and speed value, and the cost efficiency opportunity.
Gardner: It’s
clear that those organizations that can take that holistic view, that have the
long-term picture in mind, and can actually execute on it, have a significant
advantage in whatever market they are in. Is that fair?
Dillingham: It
is. And one thing that I think we tend to gloss over -- but does exist -- is a
dynamic where some of the decision-makers are not necessarily incentivized to
think and consider these options on a long-term basis.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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