There are just as many explanations to cloud services these days as there are cloud service providers. Regardless of the definition and the type of service (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS), the end result for IT is the same: infrastructure is extended off-premise. IT departments have another functionality requirement for their monitoring system as enterprises expand and resources become more dynamic.

As the uptake of cloud services increases, so does the pressure on IT to manage them. In a recent survey carried out by Opsview, 67% of organisations were concerned about the threat of cloud-sprawl. Fortunately, Opsview is ready to tackle any challenges presented by cloud monitoring.

Here are five ways to use Opsview in conjunction with cloud services.

Tune Applications, Reduce Costs

Servers in the cloud should be monitored just like servers on-site, but evaluated in finer detail especially since elastic computing provides a tuning opportunity. System resources can be added or reduced based on application needs.

Opsview graphs present historical data of monitored services to allow administrators to confidently tune dynamic resources. Certainly a powerful benefit, but reducing resources to lower costs shouldn’t compromise stability. Keeping a close eye on resource statistics allow administrators to understand events and distinguish between anomalies and patterns.

Performance trending for applications is paramount for cloud servers since the ability to turn down resources like RAM and CPU actually affects the bottom line with providers charging on a usage basis.

Extend any component into the cloud

Enterprises look to the cloud to position business critical applications, taking advantage of top tiered data centres and ease of availability to employees traveling around the world. Isn’t your monitoring system a business critical application? With Opsview’s distributed architecture, any component can be extended into the cloud. On-site slave servers can report to a master in the cloud. Slave servers can be placed in each cloud environment, serving as a backup to other slaves spread across cloud regions or different providers. The Opsview master could also stay on-site and remotely monitor cloud environments.

The ease of building in the cloud doesn’t limit how Opsview works, rather it extends its ability to monitor the “big picture” for any enterprise.

Provide Limitied Access

With so many cloud offerings, the decision on which provider to use can be time consuming. Sometimes for business reasons (fortunate or not) the decision is made for us and we have to “make it work.” A business unit may strongly suggest their servers be placed with a recognized provider while another division looks at the cheapest solution on the market.

As a result, each cloud environment may have certain users interested in only those servers. Use Opsview to give them visibility to resources and performance metrics without showing them all servers monitored. Create a Role that limits them to the Host Group for servers hosted by their cloud provider of choice. Opsview can continue to be the centralised solution to monitoring and alerting for servers in the cloud, making proprietary add-on cloud offerings unnecessary.

Use libcloud to Enhance Opsview Checks

Many cloud providers have an API as a value add to their services to help administrators manage multiple instances. Libcloud from Apache provides a way to interface multiple providers, giving IT a common platform to develop checks that span environments. Opsview includes Service Provider checks for Amazon and Slicehost, with more on the way with future updates, and easily incorporates custom scripts and checks seamlessly as administrators discover important metrics to monitor with cloud servers. Since cloud interfaces allow for quick provisioning of instances but not a detailed audit trail of who created the server, create a check and alert when new instances are added so everyone on the team is aware of additional servers in the environment.

How much impact is the cloud having on your business? We’d love to hear your thoughts…

In the light of the recent events at a BT network centre in Paddington (London, UK), where a series of compound failures caused a massive outage with huge knock-on effects, I’m sure many businesses are taking another look at their own (and their suppliers) availability with a view to beefing up business continuity. Within the spirit of continuous improvement this should be taken as an opportunity to improve the overall ’system’ rather than finger pointing.

What is business continuity?

Quite simply, business continuity is how you can stay in business (and meet your customers demands) in the wake of a disaster (whether a localised incident such as flooding or a further reaching issue like a terrorist attack). Your plan will typically cover all the business critical functions, systems and data.

So what is high availability?

High availability (or HA) is the way that system designers ensure ‘operational continuity’ of a system. This will typically involve ensuring that the system has no single point of failure (and for really fault tolerant systems there should also be no single point of recovery).

One of the common mistakes that people often make is getting confused between availability and scalability. Scaling is usually described in terms of vertical (bigger boxes) or horizontal (lots of boxes) scaling – horizontally scaled systems often have a degree of high availability whereas vertical scaling is potentially a bigger risk as you lose more capability when you lose a bigger box.

How do redundancy and diversity fit into the picture?

The phrase ‘belt & braces’ describes this nicely – two different ways of achieving the same goal.

One example might be having multiple (diverse) suppliers provide network connections to a building; in data centres it is common to have a (redundant) backup generator – though this is usually coupled with a battery-based UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to provide seamless failover.

But we’ve got this new fangled Cloud thing…

Let’s attempt to clarify what ‘cloud computing’ means – there are a number of different types of on-demand services that run ‘in the Cloud’:

• IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service
• PaaS – Platform as a Service
• SaaS – Software as a Service
• IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service

This category splits into:

• Virtual Private Server (VPS) providers such as Slicehost allow businesses to rent a fixed size virtual server on demand for a set monthly fee
• Elastic computing providers such as Amazon EC2 allow businesses to have a virtual machine image that can grow to meet requested demand (vertical scaling).

PaaS – Platform as a Service

Platform as a Service providers offer application-hosting platforms (again these can be of fixed-size or scalable) so that application developers can focus on adding business value rather than needing to worry about the underlying infrastructure. Google AppEngine is one example of this approach for Java & Python applications.

SaaS – Software-as-a-Service

Software-as-a-Service provides access to business software over the Internet for a set monthly fee. This can either be multi-tenanted, where multiple companies share a system, or with separate installations per customer. One of the major SaaS success stories is SalesForce.com who started with a CRM on-demand offering.

Public vs. private vs. hybrid clouds

We’ve already discussed public cloud offerings above; a private cloud is typically an on-premise or a dedicated outsourced managed cloud platform (e.g. using the open source Eucalyptus or VMWare vCloud). A hybrid cloud is where a private cloud is used in conjunction with one or more external cloud providers.

There is also the notion of community clouds with varying definitions:

1. whereby similar organisations pool resources into a shared multi-tenant cloud (though I prefer to describe this as a shared private cloud or a restricted cloud e.g. Google’s ‘GovCloud’)
2. a decentralised peer-to-peer cloud utilising spare computing power (and bandwidth) of internet-connected computers.

Deployment models

Assuming that your organisation can operate its business critical systems and store business critical data in the Cloud, then there are a number of possible deployment models to consider, chiefly:

1. Backup
2. Failover
3. Active-active
4. Cloud as a backup

Cloud as a backup

In this model, data plus the necessary software packages and configuration data (e.g. CMDB configuration data) for critical systems are backed up to 1 (or ideally more) hosts in the cloud. In the event of a disaster at the primary operating location, new virtual servers are commissioned and the configuration management tool (e.g. Puppet) is used to provision the servers with the appropriate software.

Recovery time is dependent upon the time taken to commission/provision the new virtual servers and perform any data transfer (or decryption). Database/file replication techniques can help to reduce the time to recover.

Failover to the cloud

For this model, there are pre-configured server instances in the cloud running the business critical systems combined with data replication. In the event of a disaster at the primary operating location, the systems are failed over to the cloud instance (this can be manual or use an automated ‘global load balancer’).

Active-active

This form of hybrid cloud is fundamentally the same as the failover option, however there are more complexities involved in the data synchronisation, session failover etc.

The Cloud

So how can the Cloud help with planning Business Continuity activities?

1 & 2: People & premises

For knowledge worker businesses, the Internet and widespread availability of broadband has increased the prevalence of distributed home workers. With a distributed workforce and cloud-based systems these two are items of less concern; it remains a practical option to have staff work from home (or indeed a temporary serviced office) in the event of a disaster accessing systems running in the cloud.

For a true ‘belt and braces’ approach, 3G/HSDPA mobile broadband dongles can be used to provide a secondary Internet connection for home workers should their main internet connection be unavailable.

3: Technology

Infrastructure-as-a-Service is very compelling for providing a Business Continuity strategy for data centre(s) using the deployment models outlined above. Furthermore, VoIP services can provide sufficient telephony cover for small-medium businesses.

4: Information

Cloud-based services (whether computing based or dedicated storage solutions e.g. Amazon S3) can aid your business in having current data stored confidentially and readily available in the event of a disaster. Some regulated organisations may have to consider whether the service provider can store data within the appropriate territory/jurisdiction. Data integrity is a further consideration for more complex system environments (particularly with the backup approach) – this needs to be taken into account for solution design / recovery procedures.

Conclusion

So we’ve established that cloud computing can alleviate some of the business continuity execution effort from your business, however you still need to plan properly (what happens if key personnel are unavailable; how will equipment & supplies be sourced) and perform due diligence on service providers to ensure that their SLAs and DR plans align with your needs.