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Articles, Cloud

IAAS PUBLIC Cloud Price comparison

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Recently I was suggested to provide information on the comparative cloud pricing mainly for the cloud as virtual host.  Its a tedious effort to obtain the similar cloud configuration as almost all cloud provider have different cloud configuration techniques for defining cloud resources in terms of CPU, Memory and Storage.  So I chose to go with the most common and bare minimum cloud configuration available across most of the cloud providers. ( excluded other factors as Load Balancer, Network Rate, Security, I/O Rate, VPN etc)

The below comparison is classified as cloud providers in US,  and Cloud Providers in India. For some of the known cloud providers it was not possible to obtain the cloud pricing for the common cloud configuration so have been excluded from the comparison. Also in some cases, some approximated pricing calculated ( like for IBM cloud, there is no SSD storage as a configuration available).

Public Cloud Comparison
Public Cloud Comparison

The source of calculation is obtained from the below cloud provider price calculator links.

Cloud Price Calculation Resources
Cloud Price Calculation Resources

 

CloudTools, Tools

Tools for Cloud Monitoring and Management

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As an add on services on top of Cloud services, Cloud vendors are coming up with tools to help enterprise IT for managing, monitoring, application deployment, orchestrate and track cloud services. These tools are built to help IT experts and business to automate the cloud management process and reduce the cost of Cloud ownership.

Below are the list of some cloud management and DevOps tools  for cloud management and monitoring

Chef

Chef turns infrastructure into code. With Chef, you can automate how you build, deploy, and manage your infrastructure. Your infrastructure becomes as versionable, testable, and repeatable as application code. Chef server stores your recipes as well as other configuration data. The Chef client is installed on each server, virtual machine, container, or networking device you manage. The client periodically polls Chef server latest policy and state of your network. If anything on the node is out of date, the client brings it up to date.

Chef is a company & configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. Chef is used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a company’s servers, and can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Rackspace,Internap, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, SoftLayer, and Microsoft Azure to automatically provision and configure new machines.

Puppet

Puppet Labs helps sysadmins automate configuration and management of machines and the software running on them. With our puppet , businesses can make rapid, repeatable changes and automatically enforce the consistency of systems and devices, across physical and virtual machines, on prem or in the cloud.

Puppet Enterprise helps automate every stage of the application delivery cycle, from initial provisioning of compute resources to storage, network, security, application and middleware provisioning to automated deployment across your data centers or availability zones. Because your infrastructure is defined as code, you can easily move workloads from the data center to the cloud.

You can use Puppet Enterprise for all of the major cloud service providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure,  VMware,  OpenStack, Google Compute Engine

AmazonCloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. It monitors EC2 for resource matrix like CPU, memory, data transfer, AWS components like RDS DB, EBS volumes, LB, Map Reduce flow. It also allows to use customer matrix for monitoring. set alarms for setting threshold and sending automated alerts. CloudWatch Dashboards enable you to create re-usable graphs of AWS resources and custom metrics so you can quickly monitor operational status and identify issues at a glance

Google Cloud Monitoring Tool

Gain insight into the performance and availability of your cloud-powered applications. Review performance metrics and logs for Google Cloud Platform services and VMs, and create custom dashboards.

Azure Management Studio

One tool to manage your Microsoft Azure cloud storage, diagnostics data and application workflows.   It takes control of your Microsoft Azure cloud storage, monitors Microsoft Azure diagnostics data and streamline Microsoft Azure workflow for cloud provisioning.

ManageEngine – Azure Performance Monitoring Tool

ManageEngine Free Azure Performance Monitor tool helps system administrator or developer to monitor resource utilization of Web/Worker Role instances. This tool can connect to the Windows Azure environment, monitor live feed data and historical data of Web/Worker Role Instances. The list of components as  a part of monitoring include Dashboard View, Graphs for Performance Counters, Historical Data, Live Data, Event Logs

IBM Cloud Monitoring

IBM® SmartCloud Monitoring provides holistic cloud availability, performance and capacity monitoring, broad health dashboards, and granular, detail views of virtual infrastructure components, as well as the virtual machine instances running in the cloud.

Rackspace Cloud Monitoring ( Integrated part of cloud )

Monitoring tool integrated with every cloud provides events processing  and sending notifications,  Customize data collection, threshold criteria, and notification alerts so that monitoring is tailored for workload and organization needs.

BMC Cloud Operation Management Tool

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management integrates with TrueSight Capacity Optimization and TrueSight Operations Management to help IT deliver fast, reliable cloud services. Intelligent analytics offer you better visibility and control—improving performance, optimizing your resource usage, and reducing your cloud costs.

Apprenda

Apprenda is a full-service enterprise PaaS stack for .NET and Java applications. Specifically, Apprenda is a “PaaS engine” that can be layered atop any arbitrary infrastructure composed of Windows and Linux OS instances. Developers upload apps to a Apprenda PaaS and, in a few button clicks, deploy the application. The Apprenda PaaS takes care of all of the mission-critical heavy lifting of allocating resources, configuring the app, and deploying it to the infrastructure. All management workflows are provided by the platform and “wrapped” around guest applications.

Cloudability

Cloudability is a financial management tool for monitoring and analyzing all cloud expenses across an organization.  It Track critical trends and spikes with customizable dashboards, reports and email, right-size your spending with usage analytics and Reserved Instance portfolio management and regulate your spending with enterprise-wide reporting for ops, finance and management

Monitis

Independently monitor  cloud providers including: Amazon®, Rackspace® and GoGrid®.  It Track virtual server instances, trigger event and notifications in case of server failures, oversee web servers, databases, mail servers, TCP ports and SSH access all based on user rules for existing and automatically launched new server instances. It also allows to add monitors and notifications automatically for newly launched servers based on user defined rules.

Boundary

It provides  early warnings about cloud problems and outages over at Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure. Customers are impressed and rivals are taking note. The secret sauce: Boundary looks at aggregate cloud data from multiple customers, then determines if there are any red alerts in the data

RightScale

RightScale provides configuration, monitoring, automation, and governance of cloud computing infrastructure and applications.  It provides on-demand access to cloud and accelerate application development,  balance agility and control with lifecycle automation and governance and derive insights from past cloud spend to forecast and optimize cloud costs.

Articles, Datacenter

IT Infrastructure Challenges and way forward

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IT Infrastructure ChallengesTypical IT Infrastructure challenges maintaining existing or building new IT Infrastructure setup are

Budgetary constraint

Reduced cost of owning IT Infrastructure is the primary goal of any business. IT cost control is further analyzed in the areas of

  • Skillful assessment of existing state of IT Infrastructure 
  • Analyzing  utilization of existing IT resources vs requirement and consolidating or reducing IT footprints.
  • Analyzing man power resource vs requirements
  • Cost control over fixed and recurring expenses.  
  • Analyzing the areas of automation
  • Dedicated capacity vs shared or cloud based managed virtual infrastructure
  • Analyzing the areas of IT energy waste.      

Availability/Uptime

Next on the business priority is to ensure the availability of IT Infrastructure components. Ensuring the availability and continuity of the business is a challenge due to below areas of concerns

    Hardware availability

  •                  Network – Ensuring each and every component of network have redundancy set and the network backbone support any failover with the least or zero impact to the Infrastructure services. 
  •                  Storage – Ensuring local or SAN or NAS based storage have raid, mirroring, replication, cloning, snapshot components are configured to ensure the data integrity and availability.
  •                  Server – Ensure all the components of the server are at least dual redundant, be it I/O controllers, power, Redundant ports, redundant local storage or redundant CPU to support the server availability.

Above three components ( Server, network and storage) become more challenging with Disaster Recovery solution in place due to the business uptime requirements. Datacenters are therefore certified with

  • Tier I – Single non redundant distribution paths, 99.671% availability allows 28.817 hours of downtime
  • Tier II – Redundant site capacity, with 99.741% availability and allows 22.688 hours of downtime.
  • Tier III – Multiple distribution availability paths ( dual powered ), with 99.982% availability and allows 1.5768 hours of downtime
  • Tier IV – Alongwith T3, HVAC systems are multi powered, with 99.995% availability and 26.28 min or .438 hours of unavailability.

    Software availability

OS Clustering: Operating system based cluster solutions ensure that in the event of unavailability or failure of any active node, the running services are failed over to the other good node. All host based/OS based clustering solutions are active/active. Cross site ( Geo ), clustering is setup for the Disaster recovery configuration.

Application clustering: Using application servers, web servers for active/active availability is achieved by using software based clustering solutions.

Monitoring: – All kinds of monitoring solution support the assurance of IT Infrastructure. Both software and hardware monitoring ensures required hardware and software components are monitored for faults or crossing the set threshold values.  Subsequently alerts are generated and sent to the concerned team ( Helpdesk/L2 or L3) support for further action.

Storage and network multipath: This ensures that at the OS level, both network and storage components are configured have redundancy . For network its called IP Multipathing or IP Bonding and for Storage its named as I/O Multipathing ( MPXIO ).

Backup:  As a part of data availability, routine backup should be in place to ensure the recovery of business data in case disasters. 

Consolidation 

Consolidation is already mentioned as a components drive to help reducing existing hardware footprint. Consolidation exercise should be performed with after detailed risk analysis. This also requires to ensure all business stakeholders are taken into confidence before performing any consolidation exercise. Consolidation of IT assets are classified further below

  • DC site consolidation – By reducing the number of datacenters, spanned through multiple geographies, wherever possible.
  • Hardware consolidation – Consolidation of hardware assets such as racks, cables, servers, storage, network components either by shutting down unused capacity or using virtualization/cloud to optimize the usage. Using pool offering than dedicated procurement allows consolidation and optimum use of IT resources.
  • Software consolidation – Analyze and consolidate unused or not required software services. Using virtualization software capability to minimize the software licencing costs.

Security:

It Infrastructure security is becoming more and more crucial requirement for the business, especially in the verticals of defense, finance or healthcare. To support data security, the IT security policies should be in place. Some of the aspects of IT security are

  • Unauthorized hardware and software ports accesses
  • Hardware and/or software based encryption to ensure the secured data transfer.
  • Regular Hardware, OS and software based patching processes
  • Regular scanning for vulnerabilities and viruses
  • Regular risk analysis, and security holes be patched immediately.
  • Security policies adhere to ISMS based information security standards
  • Adhering to required security compliance ( PCI, HIPPA, ISO27001 etc).
  • Physical security policies ( like CCTV, Entry Gate passes, visitors sign, assets in and out records, different levels of security checks at Datacenter, security practices cascaded to every employee, vendors are bound to security guidelines etc ). 

Outdated /Legacy Technologies

There are two aspects to outdated or legacy technologies. First they produce risks to the existing IT and  to the business and second legacy hardware or software increase the overall cost of support, consume more power and require expert skilled resources. So both hardware and software components should be renewed to ensure the business availability and reduced cost.

Provisioning Time

This is also addressed as a part of challenge for both hardware and software builds in terms of TCO. IT Infrastructure provisioning process should be automated to ensure the quicker availability and reduced cost of man hour efforts. Cloud based infrastructure makes is more optimum to utilize the capacity of existing hardware and software components. 

Scalability

IT Infrastructure scalability been challenges till the standalone hardware was the only choice of setting up IT Infrastructure. Since the concept of shared services, first virtualization and now cloud based infrastructure services ensure the up or down scaling of infrastructure needs.

IT Energy waste:

Green IT is the need or hour and a definitely challenge for all organizations to implement, due to the cost required to support this. Although modern data centers have adopted new technologies to reduce energy footprints and using alternate sources of energy. 

Dedicated vs Shared Infrastructure 

Most of the organization still hold a good amount of standalone infrastructure resources due to multiple factor. Be it due to the business application needs, or compliance related concerns or just a typical inter business clashes to not share the infrastructure.  Although due to the business need to reduce the hardware footprint, infrastructure should be on a shared platform, unless and until there are some serious compliance concerns. 

Automaton

Automation helps reducing the man hour efforts and overall cost of supporting IT Infrastructure. Implementation of Cloud based technologies are known for automation starting from procurement to the end of life of cloud. Other areas of automation for development and operational support of the organization also helps in ensuring the availability of the business.