JimMoyle.com

So the recent furore around Wikileaks has got me thinking about the cloud in a slightly different fashion.  I have always said that one of the big issues with the cloud has to be that you are no longer a big fish where it concerns the infrastructure that your data or applications reside upon.

If you own and run your own infrastructure then you are the biggest fish around when it comes to safeguarding the integrity of your applications and data.  It only takes the CEO to say ‘Jump’ once and everybody in the IT department starts asking ‘how high?’.

If you are a tenant on a shared service in the more traditional sense you may still be the biggest customer and you still may find yourself in the driving seat.

If we start to look at the biggest providers of all, namely Amazon and RackSpace, you are no longer a big fish in fact you will in all probability be a minnow.  Amazon have kicked wikileaks off its servers in response to political pressure, using violation of their Terms of Service as an excuse.

This is the relevant section from their ToS:

11.2. Applications and Content. You represent and warrant: [...] (iii) that Your Content (a) does not violate, misappropriates or infringes any rights of us or any third party, (b) does not constitutes defamation, invasion of privacy or publicity, or otherwise violates any rights of any third party, or (c) is not designed for use in any illegal activity or to promote illegal activities, including, without limitation, use in a manner that might be libelous or defamatory or otherwise malicious, illegal or harmful to any person or entity, or discriminatory based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age;

This seems to be needlessly vague and could, in fact, be made to apply to any client.  So what is being made clear is that if you use the cloud, you can be kicked off the service on a corporate whim.  The fact that you are now a minnow means that there is no longer any pressure on the hosting organisation to care about you at all.

This does not just apply to highly politically controversial sites, it means if porn or nudity rules are tightened, childbirth or anti-rape sites, or the Scunthorpe tourist board could be taken down.  It also doesn’t just apply to accidental inclusions, any change of the ToS could mean that you no longer qualify to use the service.

What does this mean?  Well I’d say the old adage of if your data doesn’t live in three places it doesn’t exist might well apply here.  ie use more than one cloud provider and duplicate your data.

The trouble is, if you use the above theory, it completely negates one of the big cloud advantages: Their backup, uptime and data retention policies to ensure the safety of your data are world class so you don’t have to bother.

Whatever the politics around Wikileaks, the willingness of the biggest provider to so publically drop a client, with no recourse, has to make everyone think again before moving into the cloud.

As I’m pulling together my session for BriForum I need to choose which Cloud provider to use for the demo.  I’ve come up with a list of seven pre-requisites I need and thought I’d share them with you.  I’ve refined this list as I’ve experimented with various providers to try and judge their suitability.  This list has been compiled for what I consider to be the minimum for a production IaaS offering.  Don’t take it as gospel though, your needs may be different, regard it as a starting point.

1. Open API

This is needed to automate the start-up, configuration and termination of cloud instances.  Without automation the cloud infrastructure is no use to you, a manual web page driven administration process is not going to win a provider any points with me.  As a secondary point, it’s even better if they provide tools that integrate with these API’s.  Making me write tools, is again, not going to win any points.

2. Secure IP connectivity

By this I mean the ability to secure the connection between a cloud IP subnet and private infrastructure.  If I need to create instances on demand I need to be able to securely access the subnet they are on and hide those machine from the ‘net,  only being able to access machine securely on an individual basis will not do.

3. Decent guest start-up time

By this I mean under ten minutes guaranteed.  If you only promise between 15 and 45 minutes (RackSpace) then it’s too slow.  Also as billing usually starts from the request not the availability I don’t want to be paying for time I’m not using.  The solution for this would be to move to a billing from availability model, this would motivate providers to get guests up quickly.

4. Support for new Guest versions is quickly adopted

If a new hypervisor, or a new OS version comes out I want to be able to take advantage of those features quickly, I especially don’t want my local infrastructure to be held up by interoperability problems with cloud services if they are behind the upgrade curve.  When you are waiting on a large corporation to upgrade and your business is too small to put pressure on them to make you a special case then you are going to get pretty angry pretty quickly.  There is at least on cloud provider (I’m looking at you Amazon EC2) which doesn’t support Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 and it’s nine months after RTM.

5. Hypervisor Access

I need to be able to upload my own virtual machine appliances, whether they are from a third party or one I’ve made onsite.  I also need to be able to manage the hypervisor layer with the same tools and using the same skills that I already have in house.

6. Keyboard Video Mouse console access

There is a reason that servers have KVM boards, it’s that not all problems happen after you have RDP or SSH access.  You lose a whole lot of troubleshooting information if you lose visibility of the console.

7. Hourly billing

All instances should be able to be billed hourly, I don’t mind if you have monthly charges as well, but hourly should always be available, if I need a resource permanently, I might as well host it myself.  Give us the option to try out, demo and burst into the full range of your offerings.

So have I found a provider that fits the bill?  The short answer is no.  The slightly longer answer is that I’ve found one who are really close, close enough that I’m happy to use it.  That provider is SoftLayer.

I reserve the right to change my mind at any time as providers change their offerings.