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EDITOR’S LETTER

Where Are You Going?

SURVEY SAYS 1

Heads in the Cloud

CLOUD MIGRATION SURVEY SAYS 2

A Compass Spotting Cloud’s

for the Cloud Benefits, Obstacles

APP DELIVERY OVERHEARD

Cloud Services VMworld U.S. 2017

for the DevOps Era

Not All Risks Are Risky THE NEXT BIG THING IN THE ZONE

Early adopters are sometimes characterized Opening Up Blurring the Lines

as IT daredevils, but they might be the to Open Source
most sensible people in an organization.

SEPTEMBER 2017, VOL. 6, NO. 8

 EDITOR’S LETTER
Home
Editor’s Letter
IT Innovation Where Are
Survey Says 1
You Going?
Cloud Migration
Survey Says 2
App Delivery
“YOU CAN’T BE neutral on a moving train,” is a classic quote
Overheard
from author and activist Howard Zinn, who challenged us
to consider whether a lack of action effectively endorses
The Next Big Thing the status quo. Even if you stay silently seated, Zinn rea-
soned, you’re still speeding toward some destination on
In the Zone that moving train.
I can’t help but think the quote has particular signifi-
cance in today’s political climate, where public figures are
pressured to condemn—or risk the perception of endors-
ing—the actions of more radical factions. Where silence
was once a virtue, today remaining neutral or simply quiet
is a liability.
What does any of this have to do with IT infrastructure?
While it’s probably best to keep partisan politics out of
the office, simply proceeding with your job as if the world
around you isn’t changing can be every bit as dangerous
as invoking the ire of political activists. Maintaining the
status quo, aspiring only to keep the lights on, is an en-
dorsement of mediocrity. Your business keeps hurtling
toward some unknown destination, and along the way
its IT needs will change dramatically. Organizations that
don’t overcome the natural inclination to avoid risk will
eventually face a more dangerous predicament. Before
we know it, companies that don’t have a plan to integrate
new technologies, such as big data analytics, serverless
computing and the internet of things, will struggle to
catch innovative opponents. When your business gets to
a point at which it isn’t competitive because its IT depart-
ment can’t rapidly provide what’s demanded, it shouldn’t
be any surprise how it arrived there.
It’s important to understand that in today’s world, doing
nothing—or just sticking with what’s worked so far—is
not as safe a course as it seems. To that end, TechTarget’s
Meredith Courtemanche writes this month that “Not All
Risks Are Risky” and that it’s not as perilous as you might
think to be an IT innovator or early adopter. Today’s IT
leaders are taking risks, hedging their bets and exploring
new technologies.
While you may feel powerless to alter the course of
a speeding train, doing nothing—whether in politics or
business—only ensures that you’ll have no influence on
where you’re going. Don’t let someone else determine
your destination. n
NICK MARTIN is executive editor of Modern Infrastructure.
Contact him at nmartin@techtarget.com.
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   2
IT INNOVATION

“NOBODY EVER GOT fired for choosing IBM.” That’s how the
old quip goes, and that remains the mentality of many IT
professionals today—at least in their aversion to trying
something different.
Even as disruptive apps regularly take down decades of
business as usual, the people who make everything work
under the hood gladly run in the middle of the pack, shun
beta versions and stick to the safe bet. Early adopters of
technology are out there—flying in the face of these con-
ventions—but they’re not taking on as much risk as you
might think. In fact, executives are throwing their support
behind innovative IT.

Not All Risks There was an era when a buyer blindly trusted the sales-
person, said Mark Betz, site reliability engineer at Olark,
a live chat and messaging software provider. If the tool or

Are Risky
Early adopters are sometimes characterized
as IT daredevils, but they might be the most
sensible people in an organization.
BY MEREDITH COURTEMANCHE
IWAT1929/GETTY IMAGES
platform wasn’t right, no one could blame you for relying
on a trustworthy major vendor.
With the rise of open source, the risk shifted. You’re
now responsible for understanding the product you
choose, Betz said. “Do you trust yourself to make a good
decision? Do you trust your colleagues?”
If you select a tool but don’t test it or understand how
it’s deployed before you send it to production, there’s
not much doubt who’ll be assigned blame. “If the system

HOME
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   3
 blows up and 10,000 users can’t access their accounts, that
Home
was your fault,” Betz said. “Maybe you should get fired.
Editor’s Letter
But it won’t be because somebody lied to you—it will be
because you didn’t do a good enough job.”
IT Innovation That’s democratic and empowering. It’s also scary as
hell.
Survey Says 1
Cloud Migration WHEN NEW IS THE ONLY ANSWER
Early adopters thrive on responsibility because they’re
Survey Says 2
trusted to do what’s best for the company, without a lot of
bureaucracy. The decision-making process gets stream-
App Delivery
lined, and creativity drives success.
Overheard
“You work with a small team of smart people and eval-
uate a tool, decide whether it works for you, test, imple-
The Next Big Thing ment and deploy it and just make things happen,” Betz
said. While this process is prevalent in small startups, it
In the Zone happens in large organizations as well. It boils down to
what the organization expects from its IT department—
will the autonomy and trust invested in smart profession-
als pay off?
Avoiding the best new tools and technologies carries
a cost, both in missed opportunities and in lost focus for
valuable team members.
“Engineer labor costs are probably the highest expense
n Avoiding the best new technologies carries a cost, both in missed opportunities and in lost focus.
HIGHLIGHTS n The support of senior management is crucial with the early adoption of a new technology.
n Be sure vendors show you—not tell you—what they can do.
we have as a product organization, and every single hour
that these guys lose not writing code for our customers is
very, very, very expensive,” said Lior Gavish, who started
Sookasa, a cloud-native company that was acquired by
Barracuda Networks.
He adopted SignifAI, a monitoring intelligence dash-
board tool, while the vendor was still in stealth mode.
With the tool in place, his DevOps team could spend
more time writing product code and less time setting up
monitoring alerts.
Dedicating manpower to analyze every part of the sys-
tem and set the thresholds, which change rapidly, won’t
create business value, reasoned Gavish, now vice presi-
dent of engineering at Barracuda. Rather than the user
inputting what to track and how to set thresholds, SignifAI
absorbs systems’ metrics and automatically detects anom-
alies. It correlates metrics to associate anomalies together
and create a full picture of operations and dependencies.
“Even if you make it part of your DNA to monitor every
new feature you launch, it’s insanely hard to maintain
it—it’s impossible unless someone spends all of their time
on it,” Gavish said. So whether to add an upstart tool for
that task goes back to the question: What do you want to
pay people to do?
This same reasoning plays out in the rapid adoption of
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   4
 internet of things (IoT) technology and the software plat-
Home
forms that support it. Early adopters of technology seek to
Editor’s Letter
differentiate an IoT product or transform a process to be
more efficient and effective with predictive insights—it
IT Innovation could be life or death for the business.
Survey Says 1
AVOIDING THE BEST NEW
Cloud Migration TOOLS CARRIES A COST, BOTH
Survey Says 2
IN MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
AND IN LOST FOCUS FOR
App Delivery VALUABLE TEAM MEMBERS.
Overheard
For a traditional company such as Boeing, IoT software
The Next Big Thing platforms enable it to sell a plane engine with an uptime
promise, said Michele Pelino, an analyst at Forrester Re-
In the Zone search. The group that made the engine tracks what’s hap-
pening inside products in the field and sends replacement
parts to a plane’s next destination if a piece is wearing out.
The aerospace company’s goal is not to create an IoT
software platform; the goal is to connect devices and
gather useful data to sell its engines. The next step for
early adopters is to source a platform that simplifies this
complexity, which requires a lot of legwork before you buy.
DO IT WITHOUT GOING DOWN IN FLAMES
n Everyone’s behind you. With an unconventional vendor
choice and early adoption of a new technology, it’s critical
to win the support of senior management. Remember how
no one ever got fired for choosing IBM? The person in
charge of hiring and firing will decide if the early-adopter
culture is acceptable. That buy-in will determine how
the organization constrains or guides the decisions that
innovators make.
Beyond that boardroom champion, build consensus.
“You have to get the architects, the engineers, the finance
team and the ops team aligned around [one thing,]” Gav-
ish said.
Lean on your colleagues. To go from laggard to early
n
adopter, it helps to have a guide who has been there before.
Experienced veterans from startups can naturally undo
the instinct to shun risk rather than chase reward.
As part of his duties as vice president at Barracuda,
Gavish is tasked with creating a startup stack mentality—
cloud-based containers and infrastructure as code—to
modernize the company’s back-end IT. “When we first
came in and we were talking about AWS [Amazon Web
Services], it was this nebulous idea. … Nobody had re-
ally looked at the [AWS Management Console]; nobody
had really built anything on AWS,” Gavish said. “It’s hard
for me to explain to other people at Barracuda that you
absolutely can’t SSH [Secure Socket Shell] into our
machines.”
His team exposed their counterparts throughout the
organization to real production loads in the cloud. When
you can see containers, DevOps, immutable infrastructure
as code, cloud services and other leading-edge ideas and
technologies in action, it clears up a lot of misconceptions
and mythology.
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   5
 n Know what you want. When sourcing technologies that
Home
don’t have traditional maturity benchmarks, research be-
comes even more important. Don’t talk to the vendor until The Lonely Road
Editor’s Letter
you know what problems you need to solve, Pelino said. to Innovation
IT Innovation “Many hundreds of [vendors] say, ‘I’m an IoT platform’
today,” she said, and that’s common with new technologies
Survey Says 1 that lack a standard definition. In IoT, certain software
platforms are better for connected products and others
Cloud Migration suit connected processes; some work more with consum-
er-focused users, and others with industrial products.
Survey Says 2
Only some IoT platforms will deploy and scale seamlessly
and securely with your enterprise architecture.
72%
App Delivery
When you’re ready to engage vendors, ask questions
Overheard
about functionality, pricing, support and integration. of organizations
pursuing an IoT initiative
“Early adopters of any technology find that folks are said less than 10 people were involved in
The Next Big Thing speaking the same words, but they mean something dif- the project, with 12% saying it was
a single-person effort.
ferent,” Pelino said. Tell vendors to show you—not tell
In the Zone you—what they can do. Don’t fall into the trap of chasing
SOURCE: TECHTARGET’S INTERNET OF THINGS PULSE SURVEY; N=1,037
the best tool rather than the right tool.
“While you may not have the whole answer to every-
thing, you certainly will have a great framework for having
that conversation,” she said. experience with the technology.
Some vendors have great capabilities but poor imple-
n Get what you’re promised. Whether the provider has mentation support and professional services for trouble-
decades of experience or just hours, the key is to evalu- shooting, Pelino warned. Betz added that open source
ate your purchase. Current and past customers are good tools, while more transparent, frequently have ad hoc
places to start for objective feedback on the product. support.
“There are many tools that might be new to us, but New technologies developed by companies with tre-
have a long following in the open source world,” Olark’s mendous scale—think Google or Facebook—are cutting
Betz said. For example, you may be implementing Elastic- edge without commensurate risk. Betz cites Google Cloud
search for the first time, but thousands of other users have Platform (GCP). As an early adopter of GCP years ago, he

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   6

 bet on a company that was new to cloud sales at the time, management. “By the time we take it into production, we
Home
but versed in cloud-scale operations and management. never feel like we’re holding our breath,” Betz said.
Editor’s Letter
GCP is now a top public cloud option. “People talk about moving fast and breaking things. I
don’t really like the second part of that, ... but I definitely
IT Innovation
n Trust but verify. “Sometimes you go a little cowboy,” like moving fast,” Betz said. n
Betz said, when an unproven tool is the only answer you’ve
Survey Says 1 found to a given problem. For that enticing new GitHub
MEREDITH COURTEMANCHE is a senior site editor in TechTarget’s
repository, open source code mitigates danger to produc-
Data Center and Virtualization group, writing and editing for sites
Cloud Migration tion, revealing if a tool is flaky or has security bugs. including SearchITOperations, SearchWindowsServer and
The tool goes through preproduction verification as SearchExchange. Find her work @DataCenterTT or email her
Survey Says 2
well. Staging and experimentation provide a layer of risk at mcourtemanche@techtarget.com.

App Delivery

Overheard

The Next Big Thing

In the Zone

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   7

 zzzzzz

Home
Survey Says 1
Heads in the Cloud

Editor’s Letter

IT Innovation
D How would you characterize your D Where are your workloads hosted?
Survey Says 1 organization’s cloud adoption?
Cloud Migration

33% Cloud-focused (heavy use)

Survey Says 2
41%
25% Cloud explorer (running apps)
Public cloud
App Delivery
38%
22% Cloud beginner (first project) Private cloud
Overheard

The Next Big Thing

14% Cloud watcher (planning)

In the Zone 06% No plans

30
The estimated percent of cloud spending
that is wasted, according to respondents.

SOURCE FOR ALL CHARTS: RIGHTSCALE’S 2017 STATE OF THE CLOUD REPORT; N=1,002; ART: VENIMO/GETTY IMAGES
21%
Non-cloud
infrastructure

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   8

CLOUD MIGRATION

AS BUSINESSES INCREASINGLY assess whether to move their

applications to the public cloud, third-party tools have
emerged to aid in the decision-making process and to ease
complex migrations. These products can help, but IT pro-
fessionals will still need to think through a complicated
set of trade-offs on the way to the best decision.
“Most companies, not just industry market leaders, are
at least thinking about moving all of their applications to
the public cloud,” said Robert Christiansen, vice president
and cloud adoption practice lead at Cloud Technology
Partners, a cloud services and software company. While
public cloud is gaining traction because of its flexibility

A Compass and cost, the technology is not suited for all applications.
Moving to the public cloud has become quite common.

for the Cloud

In fact, market researcher Enterprise Management As-
sociates (EMA) found in a spring 2017 survey that 19%
of on-premises applications will move to a public cloud
A new crop of tools is helping guide within the next 12 months.
organizations along their cloud journey.
BY PAUL KORZENIOWSKI
CLOUD ADVANTAGES: COSTS, AUTOMATION
With public cloud, a business avoids large upfront capital
costs associated with on-premises alternatives. Rather
than fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars for servers
RUNEER/GETTY IMAGES

HOME
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   9
 all at once, public cloud enables companies to spread their
Home
IT expenses into ongoing, monthly payments.
Editor’s Letter
Not only are in-house servers expensive, but they also
have firm capacity limits.
IT Innovation “Many businesses overprovision their data center re-
sources because they want to avoid potential performance
Survey Says 1 issues,” said Jay Lyman, principal analyst 451 Research.
Public cloud’s bursting capabilities enable a business to
Cloud Migration pay only for the resources it needs.
By comparison, cloud services include more auto-
Survey Says 2
mation features than a typical on-premises data center.
Rather than retain multiple layers of employees involved
App Delivery
in tasks such as allocating new infrastructure, a cloud ser-
Overheard
vice will provide application-centric automation functions
for self-service provisioning, said Torsten Volk, managing
The Next Big Thing research director at EMA.
Keeping a data center current requires manpower as
In the Zone well as money. Staff needs to manage system performance
and secure network connections. With technology evolv-
ing at a rapid pace, corporations find themselves scram-
bling to find and hire qualified workers. By using public
cloud services, businesses offload staffing challenges and
reduce their own personnel expenses. “We have a client
that supports 20,000 virtual machines on a global network
with less than 100 IT workers,” Christiansen said.
n Public cloud enables companies to spread their IT expenses into ongoing, monthly payments.
HIGHLIGHTS n Many business leaders do not view IT infrastructure management as strategic to the business.
n With public cloud, traffic moves over the WAN. Connections may need to be upgraded.
Another key driver behind the push to the cloud is the
CFO’s demand to get out of the business of operating IT in-
frastructure, Volk said. Many business leaders do not view
infrastructure management as strategic to the business
and instead want to hand that task over to a third party.
NOT EVEN CLOUD IS PERFECT
But public cloud is not a panacea. Some workloads fit
better on site. In fact, Uptime Institute found that despite
the recent cloud hullabaloo, the percentage of applications
running in corporate data centers has remained constant
at 65% since 2014.
One reason is that cloud computing isn’t always cheaper
than on-premises systems.
To help organizations determine how much services
will cost, public cloud vendors offer pricing calculators.
Some organizations have found such tools helpful.
Hightail, a file-sharing and collaboration platform ven-
dor, began researching a move to Amazon Web Services
(AWS) in 2014. The business, which has about 100 em-
ployees, operates data centers in the United States and the
United Kingdom. Initially, Hightail was leery of relying
on AWS tools to price its service because costs have many
variables, said Shiva Paranandi, senior vice president of
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   10
 technology at Hightail. “The AWS solution has proven to
Home
be quite accurate in its estimates,” Paranandi said. Corralling Cloud Costs
Editor’s Letter
Since these tools come from vendors, they may not
present businesses with the most efficient options.
IT Innovation “The public cloud financial tools only examine basic
functions, like average and peak system utilization,” said
Survey Says 1

Cloud Migration
Andrew Hillier, CTO at Densify, a cloud predictive ana-
lytics supplier that until recently went by the name Cirba.
In terms of actual costs, the details matter. AWS
42%
of respondents said
controlling cloud cost
charges customers for moving information in and out of was their primary IT
Survey Says 2
the cloud. A workload that has high I/O—say, an e-com- operations priority.

merce application—may not be a good fit for public cloud.

App Delivery
In response, third-party software—such as Densify, CA
Overheard
Unified Infrastructure Management, CloudFabrix App-
Dimensions and VMware vRealize Operations—offers
The Next Big Thing vendor-agnostic help so businesses discover potential
financial gotchas.
In the Zone Performance is always a worry. Cloud moves applica-
tions and information out from central data centers—
which often are located in the corporate office—to remote
locations. The change often affects performance. SOURCE: TEN PRIORITIES FOR HYBRID CLOUD, CONTAINERS,
“You need to know how much database latency your AND DEVOPS IN 2017; ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES;
ILLUSTRATION: RUNEER/GETTY IMAGES
application can endure while still delivering acceptable
performance,” EMA’s Volk said.
The enterprise network may become a bottleneck. With
public cloud, traffic moves out of the data center and over of Virtustream, a cloud provider and Dell Technologies
the WAN. Necessary upgrades to those connections can business unit. “Initially, we had a 20 Mbps [multiprotocol
be tedious and expensive. label switching] connection but needed more bandwidth,”
In the spring of 2016, PrimeSource Building Products, said Tony Caesar, PrimeSource’s CIO. The company then
a building materials manufacturer, decided to migrate its upgraded to a 100 Mbps burstable connection.
SAP ERP application to the public cloud with the help Public cloud providers often offer only basic network

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   11

 protocol support: HTTP/HTTPS and TCP. Customers
Home
may require more. The provider’s data center could be
geographically far from users, which increases latency and
Multicloud Mania
Editor’s Letter Among the 260 enterprises EMA surveyed, the
diminishes performance. The provider may not support majority of respondents—61%—reported using
IT Innovation techniques—such as caching, compression and TCP opti- two or more public cloud providers.
mizations—typically used to boost network performance.

35+21+181610
Survey Says 1
35%
use four
Cloud Migration TAKING THE FIRST STEP or more 21%
public use no
Once a company decides to move to public cloud, another
clouds public
Survey Says 2
consideration is a cloud migration tool. Cloud vendors cloud
have taken the lead here, too.
App Delivery
The AWS Migration Service, for example, automatically
Overheard
replicates live server volumes to AWS and installs machine 10% 18%
images as needed. The system creates custom migration use three use one
public public
The Next Big Thing schedules and tracks their progress. clouds cloud
16%
The migration process requires a detailed workload use two
In the Zone analysis. Here a business identifies application dependen- public clouds
cies, sometimes discovering unwelcome system surprises.
“We found that business units had installed applications SOURCE: TEN PRIORITIES FOR HYBRID CLOUD, CONTAINERS,
AND DEVOPS IN 2017; ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES
without input from the IT department,” Caesar said.
Third-party migration tools are available to address
such problems. Racemi sells the DynaCenter migration
tool. RiverMeadow Software offers live workload cloning In addition, public cloud services are dynamic. AWS,
for workload testing. Virtustream designs new workflows. for one, issues new releases every few minutes. The third-
While the various cloud planning tools are helpful, they party vendors find it difficult to keep their tools current
also have shortcomings. These products focus on the most with such rapidly changing system designs. n
common application migration scenarios. On-premises
and cloud storage systems often manage data in funda- PAUL KORZENIOWSKI is a freelance writer who has been covering
mentally different ways, so custom development may be technology issues for more than two decades. Email him at
needed to bridge the gaps. paulkorzen@aol.com and follow him on Twitter: @PaulKorzeniowsk.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   12

 w

Home
Survey Says 2
Spotting Cloud’s Benefits, Obstacles

Editor’s Letter

IT Innovation
D What do you see as the benefits D What challenges do you face
Survey Says 1 to cloud computing? with cloud computing?
Cloud Migration

62% Faster access to infrastructure 25% Lack of resources or expertise

Survey Says 2

61% Greater scalability 25% Security

App Delivery

Overheard 56% Higher availability 25% Managing cloud spend

The Next Big Thing 51% Faster time to market 23% Compliance

In the Zone
40% Business continuity 23% Governance and control

40% Geographic reach 22% Managing multiple cloud services

38% Higher performance 19% Complexity of building a private cloud

38% Move Capex to Opex 11% Performance

53+47+C
35% Cost savings

of respondents said
34% IT staff efficiency optimizing existing cloud
53%
use for cost savings was a
primary initiative for 2017.
SOURCE: RIGHTSCALE’S 2017 STATE OF THE CLOUD REPORT; N=1,002

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   13

APP DELIVERY

CLOUD SERVICES HAVE transformed IT infrastructure, but

the latest cloud trends signal a more fundamental shift
that’s reshaping jobs. Newer cloud services and applica-
tion design principals—such as microservices, serverless
computing and function as a service—have important
implications for both IT operations staff and developers.
However, understanding the difference between these
services and how they affect application deployment
can be confusing, especially since most cloud providers
will simply tell you their service is best. Let’s review the
characteristics that define each service and how they fit
in with DevOps methods.

Cloud Services for THE RISE OF MICROSERVICES

In 2011, the concept of microservice architecture was just

the DevOps Era

beginning. By 2015, every developer was talking about it.
Large companies were all in on microservices, touting
the benefits of code reusability, mitigation of risk from
Microservices and serverless can upgrades and the speed at which teams could deploy
change application delivery. new features. Microservices made it easy for developers
BY CHRIS MOYER to work in small teams while still contributing to a large-
scale product capable of managing an outage to any single
microservice.
RONDABROC.COM/ADOBE STOCK

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MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   14
 There are three key ingredients to a microservice:
Home
Editor’s Letter
n It is independently scalable and deployable.
n Each service is responsible for the smallest possible
IT Innovation task.
n Services may work better together, but they will fail
Survey Says 1 gracefully if one dies.
Cloud Migration For example, Netflix employs several microservices in
its overall product, including one for recommendations
Survey Says 2
on videos to watch next. If that recommendation service
goes down, the rest of the streaming platform continues
App Delivery
on as if nothing happened.
Overheard
Microservices helped lead to the launch of Docker,
which allowed developers to further segregate their in-
The Next Big Thing dividual components via containerization. Docker helps
developers deploy applications more quickly and in mul-
In the Zone tiple parts—without having to worry about underlying
hardware or even the OS.
THE CASE FOR SERVERLESS COMPUTING
The concept of serverless computing stands on the prem-
ise that developers should not have to worry at all about
underlying hardware. Google App Engine made serverless
n Microservices made it easy for developers to work in small teams on a large product.
HIGHLIGHTS n With FaaS, users are able to run on-demand code blocks that are lightweight.
n With more apps moving to serverless platforms, developers need to learn about ops.
computing available before Amazon Web Services’ (AWS)
Lambda made it popular. While Google App Engine was
an amazing technology, it was too early for developers to
give up control of the underlying hardware, and was not
very well deployed.
There are three key elements that make something
serverless:
n There are no idle charges, meaning there is no cost for
time that isn’t used.
n There is no provisioning required. Infrastructure
scales automatically.
n You do not need to manage any OS, hardware or un-
related software.
Some providers may put in safeguards or limits to how
much capacity you can use without manually requesting
more. The point here is to ensure that—as scaling happens
automatically—you don’t end up with an unexpectedly
high bill.
Some, but not all, serverless computing environments
are also function as a service (FaaS). For example, AWS
Lambda and Auth0’s Webtasks are both serverless FaaS.
AWS CodeBuild and Google App Engine are serverless,
but not FaaS.
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   15
 GO ON DEMAND WITH FUNCTION AS A SERVICE
Home
Amazon introduced AWS Lambda in 2015. Lambda thrust
Editor’s Letter
users into serverless computing, and it also introduced
the concept of function as a service. AWS Lambda is both
IT Innovation serverless—no managed provisioning, idle charges or
hardware to manage—and a FaaS.
Survey Says 1 There are three key factors that define FaaS:
Cloud Migration n It executes code on demand (no idle executions).
n It scales automatically.
Survey Says 2 n It runs one specific function without worrying about
OS, hardware, etc.
App Delivery
Overheard
With FaaS, users are able to run on-demand code blocks
that are lightweight, as well as easily created and torn
The Next Big Thing down. Functions running in this environment need to
have minimal runtime—typically less than five minutes—
In the Zone and are often best suited for applications that respond di-
rectly to user interactions. For example, a developer could
write code for a FaaS that serves up a dynamic website or
checks a user’s permissions to a given API. FaaS is often
used as middleware to apply business logic rules for user
interactions with a database. It is also commonly used for
webhooks or other event-based triggers.
FaaS does not imply serverless. For example, Docker
Functions requires you to run servers (or VMs) running
Docker; but it allows you to quickly trigger a single con-
tainer with a bit of code. FaaS simply means the code is
executed only in response to an event. It does not require
that the underlying infrastructure remain idle while wait-
ing for a customer’s code.
WHERE PLATFORM AS A SERVICE FITS
Platform as a service (PaaS) is an older concept. While
similar to FaaS in that it does not require any manual
provisioning, PaaS often involves some idle runtimes
and isn’t truly considered microservices. PaaS providers
include Google App Engine and Heroku. These providers
typically offer a framework, such as Express.js, or a custom
Python framework, such as Google App Engine, and auto-
matically scale the infrastructure—adding servers—based
on application need.
There are two key conditions that define PaaS:
n It’s a single, end-to-end platform that builds an entire
application.
n It requires no provisioning, no hardware, no OS and
no other software.
Many developers have switched away from PaaS of-
ferings in favor of FaaS, as the latter offers a higher level
of abstraction without as much vendor lock-in. Google’s
Firebase, however, is a PaaS that’s becoming more popu-
lar. Google Firebase started off as a simple database as a
service, but has since morphed into a broader platform
offering lots of connected parts. Firebase is unique in
that it’s a fully fledged PaaS that provides FaaS as one of
its offerings.
THE MANY USES OF SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE
The highest level of abstraction, away from any user-man-
agement requirements, is software as a service (SaaS).
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   16
 Database as a service is a type of SaaS that offers services
Home
that enable developers to build better applications without
Editor’s Letter
managing databases.
In order to be SaaS, the software needs to meet the
IT Innovation following criteria:
Survey Says 1 n run without any installation on your part;
n require no coding to get started;
Cloud Migration n be
accessible from anywhere that has internet con-
nectivity; and
Survey Says 2 n automatically scale to your needs.
App Delivery
There are many types of SaaS, including products such
Overheard
as Salesforce and Gmail. Developers and IT operations
professionals use SaaS-based tools for application perfor-
The Next Big Thing mance monitoring, databases and security.
It’s important to note that developers need more than
In the Zone SaaS to create an application, and SaaS offerings cannot be
joined to make a new application. Anything that requires
coding to connect things together is not SaaS. Typical
serverless applications will use something like a FaaS
to connect to multiple SaaS offerings to prevent having
to run any servers at all, such as running FaaS on AWS
Lambda and connecting to Amazon DynamoDB—which
is a database SaaS.
THE DEVOPS CONNECTION
Cloud services remove a lot of work for operations staff,
who can focus on managing services rather than hardware.
As cloud computing becomes more popular, organi-
zations require operational IT staff to switch from just
managing hardware to learning development in order
to manage virtualized hardware. This is where the term
DevOps started. Operations staff needed to learn addi-
tional skills to survive in the new cloud age. In some or-
ganizations, operations teams transformed into DevOps
teams, which require operations professionals to learn
some coding in order to keep up and stay relevant.
Microservices, serverless computing and FaaS, how-
ever, have introduced a new fundamental shift. Now that
we’re moving more applications to serverless platforms,
it’s the developers’ turn to learn a little bit more about
operations. We can’t rely on operations staff to manage
cloud resources if the cloud providers automatically han-
dle everything for us. This doesn’t mean that serverless
functions will immediately scale indefinitely. It’s not like
with traditional architecture where operations teams
can just add additional virtual instances or request more
capacity. It’s important to know where bottlenecks exist.
Developers need to be aware of limitations before they
develop services designed for web-scale architecture.
For example, DynamoDB is a service that developers
can provision to nearly infinite scale. However, practical
scale is limited by the hash key. Hash keys are hard to
change after an application is built, so developers need to
understand these limitations before starting development.
Otherwise, they end up rewriting code later. n
CHRIS MOYER , vice president of technology at ACI Information Group,
has been developing cloud applications since 2007. Follow him on
Twitter: @kopertop.
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   17
 zzzzzz

Home
Overheard at VMworld U.S. 2017 in Las Vegas

Editor’s Letter

IT Innovation

Survey Says 1

“You can have the best “Like many companies, we’re

Cloud Migration
algorithms in the world, seeing a lot of ways technology
Survey Says 2 but without data to could disrupt our industry.”
feed it, it’s useless.” MATT NIKOLAIEV, senior director of cloud infrastructure
App Delivery MICHAEL DELL, CEO of Dell Technologies services at Sysco

Overheard

The Next Big Thing

“My biggest fear is “We want to make

In the Zone “NSX is sure you have
becoming losing my technical
mojo—becoming access to the
the secret most modern
sauce a suit in a suit.”
CHAD SAKAC, president of infrastructure.”
behind converged platforms and solutions RAY O’FARRELL, executive vice
everything at Dell EMC president and CTO at VMware

we do.”
PAT GELSINGER,
VMware CEO

“All of you running data centers know that

inconsistency is the enemy.”
SAM RAMJI, vice president of product management at Google Cloud Platform

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   18

 THE NEXT BIG THING

Home

Editor’s Letter

IT Innovation Opening Up Still, open source strategies create attractive oppor-

Survey Says 1
to Open Source
Cloud Migration
Start small—but, by all means,
get started.
Survey Says 2
BY MIKE MATCHETT
App Delivery
Overheard
The Next Big Thing
IT’S IRONIC THAT we spend a lot of money on proprietary
In the Zone databases, business applications and structured business
intelligence platforms for “little” data, but we turn to open
source platforms for big data analytics. Why not just scale
down free, big data open source systems to handle the
little data too?
Of course, there are a number of real reasons, including
minimizing risk and assuring enterprise-class data man-
agement requirements. Cost probably isn’t even the first
criteria for most enterprises. Even when it comes to cost,
open source doesn’t mean free in a real economic sense.
Open source strategies require cutting-edge expertise,
professional support and often buy-up into proprietary
enterprise-class feature sets. The truth is, open source
platforms don’t necessarily maximize ROI.
tunities for businesses that want to evolve their aging
applications. Many IT investing strategies now include
a core principle preferring open source for new applica-
tions. In fact, we’d claim open source now represents the
fastest growing segment of enterprise IT initiatives. From
a theoretical point of view, when it comes to developing
new ways of doing business, new types of agile and web-
scale applications, and new approaches to analyze today’s
ever-bigger data, open source presents innovative oppor-
tunities to compete and even disrupt the competition.
But this is much easier said than done. We’ve seen many
enterprises fumble with aggressive open source strategies,
eventually reverting to tried-and-true proprietary soft-
ware stacks. So if enterprises aren’t adopting open source
because it’s cheaper, and it often lacks enterprise-class
features, then why has it become such a popular strategy?
Adopting open source strategies goes hand in hand with
an ability to attract top technical talent, Rajnish Verma
said at the Dataworks Summit in June, when he was pres-
ident of big data software vendor Hortonworks. Smart
people want to work in an open source environment so
they can develop in-demand skills, establish broader re-
lationships outside a single company and potentially con-
tribute back to a larger community—all part of building a
personal brand, I suppose.
In other words, organizations adopt open source be-

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   19

 cause that’s what today’s prospective employees want to
Home
work on.
Editor’s Letter
IT Innovation ALL OPEN, OR MOSTLY OPEN?
When organizations adopt open source strategies, they
Survey Says 1 rarely intend to dive into the source code. That would
require hiring internal miracle workers—an expensive
Cloud Migration proposition. Instead, they contract for support, usually
with a vendor that’s a primary contributor to the open
Survey Says 2
source project.
Often, but not always, this is the company that has
App Delivery
many of the original open source project contributors on
Overheard
staff, and continues to make the most commits back to
the code base. Sometimes, like with big data analytics,
The Next Big Thing this gets competitive, resulting in several downstream
distributions—each from a different vendor.
In the Zone In addition, it’s common to find that the business model
of an open source distributor includes layering on some
proprietary licensed components that provide enterprise
features. In other words, I can download the application
and run it freely on my laptop, but IT shops will likely need
to deploy an enterprise version—as a license or through
a support contract—to get all the security, scale, service
levels and management features they need in a production
data center.
As an example, the main Apache Hadoop distribution
vendors include Hortonworks, Cloudera and MapR Tech-
nologies. It is important to note that as the big data space
has evolved over the last 10 years, none of these companies
still actively promote themselves as a Hadoop distribution.
In fact, they are all repositioning and rebranding as
next-generation data processing platforms. In particular,
they are no longer tied to any specific project but able to
evolve a broader field of offerings and value propositions
—and not limited, for example, to the original Hadoop
MapReduce or even the Hadoop Distributed File System.
In general, big data distribution vendors have added en-
terprise features for operations and governance, SQL and
business application support, and have evolved real-time
components, Spark support and a focus on machine learn-
ing. The future for all of these companies may revolve
around how they come to support containers, the internet
of things, cloud and edge architectures. But, of course,
each vendor focuses on carving out a niche:
n Hortonworks. Taking the high road in terms of open
source purity, Hortonworks is striving today to be your
other major IT vendors’ big data analytical platform, with
deep partnerships with Microsoft and IBM. Somewhat
ironically, this requires customized integration with a
partner’s proprietary stack.
n Cloudera. From the start, the market leader focused on
directly meeting enterprise needs and helping IT transi-
tion to next-gen applications. Cloudera also helps IT move
away from expensive legacy enterprise data warehouse
stacks to more cost-effective operational intelligence
platforms.
n MapR eschewed plain Hadoop Distributed File
MapR.
System and created a fully transactional—and, as a storage
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   20
 analyst, I could say software-defined—big data storage and strive to get ahead of them. Employee demand will
Home
layer. Today MapR’s platform works as well as a scalable likely make open source inevitable. And there is probably
Editor’s Letter
container host as it does for hosting converged application already an internal need for some deeper experience and
types, such as online analytical and transaction processing knowledge about just what’s available in all those public
IT Innovation and big data. open source projects.
If you have been avoiding open source, it’s best to first
Survey Says 1 Maybe this is not how these vendors present themselves implement some smaller projects before taking on major
in their own elevator pitches, but you get the idea that, open source initiatives. Encourage employees to take
Cloud Migration with multiple open source vendors, there are important ownership for some open source sandboxes. Play with
differences in mission and vision. An IT shop just kicking different distributions and learn where you can use mostly
Survey Says 2
tires will find a lot in common among them at a functional open applications. Learn about the edge elements of key
level, whereas key differences might show up later in pro- open source offerings, such as how you secure, manage
App Delivery
duction operations. and integrate them into existing architectures. And re-
Overheard
member that although the future of IT will be more open
with bigger data, it’s still a small world. n
The Next Big Thing OPEN IS AS OPEN DOES
IT managers would do well to recognize the real drivers MIKE MATCHETT is senior analyst at Taneja Group. Reach him on
In the Zone pushing their organizations toward open source strategies Twitter: @smworldbigdata.

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   21

 IN THE ZONE

Home

Editor’s Letter

IT Innovation Blurring woefully underutilized due to legacy storage protocols

Survey Says 1
the Lines
Cloud Migration
Persistent memory is reshaping
the enterprise storage business.
Survey Says 2
BY MARK MAY
App Delivery
Overheard
The Next Big Thing
OVER THE LAST few years, the enterprise data center has
In the Zone been embracing the flash storage medium as a core com-
ponent of modern infrastructure. With nearly 60% of
organizations using flash storage already, it’s clear this
trend is here to stay.
As much as enterprise IT has embraced flash storage,
we have only scratched the surface of the ever-changing
storage world. An emerging market for persistent memory
has been forming and generating a lot of hype, but how
does that market look today?
To understand the market, we need to understand
how we got to where we are today. The last few decades
have had near linear growth of CPU performance and
almost flat growth of storage performance. The advent
of NAND flash helped close the gap, but CPU remains
and software. Persistent memory hopes to bridge that
performance gap in the enterprise data center, but in any
immature market, there is a lot of hype and market con-
fusion to be wary of.
Before we can understand the state of persistent mem-
ory, we need to know a little bit about the technology.
Namely, we need to understand that it isn’t a product or
even a specific implementation of technology. Simply put,
persistent memory is persistent storage with latency low
enough that it could be used as memory. It’s fast like mem-
ory and persistent like storage. Lots of emerging and new
technologies fall under this category, but to be persistent
memory, it must have a few characteristics:
n Appear as a byte-addressable medium from a program-
ming point of view. This means it looks like memory
with a virtual address range and not a hard drive with
logical block addressing.
n Usesload/store and not read/write for data access. It
should appear as a memory device that just happens to
be persistent.
n Have extremely predictable latency.
The concept is simple enough, but it gets complicated

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   22

 when a single device can be both persistent memory and
Home
block storage. The most common commercially available
Editor’s Letter
device that can be persistent memory is a nonvolatile dual
in-line memory module (NVDIMM). Currently there
IT Innovation are three types of NVDIMMs, and each has different
characteristics:
Survey Says 1
n NVDIMM-N is just memory-mapped dynamic RAM
Cloud Migration (DRAM) with onboard flash as a persistent layer. Think
Survey Says 2
of this as DRAM backed up by the onboard flash. When
most people say NVDIMM, they are talking about this
type of device.
App Delivery
n NVDIMM-F is memory-mapped flash. It’s similar to a
Overheard
solid-state drive in that it has block access, but it avoids
The Next Big Thing the latency of a hard drive because it sits in the memory
channel.
In the Zone
n N VDIMM-P is a combination of memory-mapped
DRAM and memory-mapped flash, giving us the best of
both worlds.
And if the taxonomy wasn’t convoluted enough, we
have nonvolitile memory express (NVMe) which has
nothing to with persistent memory at all.
Moving data as close to the CPU as possible allows us to
get the best performance for our data and maximize CPU
usage on a system. Systems like SAP HANA, high-per-
formance computing and big data applications are driv-
ing demand for this type of innovation. The problem is
applications are designed to use block storage for data
persistence. To get around that problem, we have to either
refactor the applications or insert a file system between
the persistent memory and the application. To really get
all the benefits of persistent memory, the software has to
be designed to take advantage of it.
SIMPLY PUT, PERSISTENT
MEMORY IS PERSISTENT
STORAGE WITH LATENCY
LOW ENOUGH THAT IT COULD
BE USED AS MEMORY.
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: Intel 3D
XPoint. When Intel and Micron first promoted 3D
XPoint—now called Optane—it was touted as being 1,000
times faster and more durable than NAND, and 10 times
the density of DRAM. The first Optane products in the
market are, essentially, PCI-based caching devices that
accelerate existing hard drives, and not exactly persistent
memory. This means they haven’t lived up to the massive
initial marketing claims. However, expect this to change
as Intel ships Optane DIMMs in the future. Intel’s 3D
XPoint isn’t the only game in town either; Samsung has
its custom-designed Z-NAND, and Hewlett Packard En-
terprise (HPE) has its non-silicon RAM-like memristor
technology.
For any persistent memory technology to really take
off, it’s going to need strong support from server manu-
facturers and operating system makers. With Dell, HPE
MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   23
 and Super Micro either planning to or already supporting
Home
persistent memory, we can presume the technology is
Editor’s Letter
going to stick around. Linux, starting with kernel version
4.2, has had strong support for persistent memory. Win-
IT Innovation dows Server 2016 has strong support as well. Both have
native persistent memory file systems as well as libraries
Survey Says 1 for developing applications with direct, persistent mem-
ory access.
Cloud Migration As with any new technology, the cost is a huge factor.
NVDIMMs, which have some overlap with the NAND
Survey Says 2
flash manufacturing process, may be cheaper than Optane
DIMMs in the initial price. However, for enterprises to
adopt either technology, it’s going to need to hit the $1.50
to $2 per gigabyte price point. Persistent memory is in its
infancy, so don’t expect mainstream adoption until 2019
at the earliest. n
MARK MAY , a veteran infrastructure specialist, runs the blog
VirtualStorageZone.com and works as a freelance writer focusing
on storage, networking and virtualization.

App Delivery

Overheard

The Next Big Thing

In the Zone

MODERN INFRASTRUCTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017   24

Home

Editor’s Letter

IT Innovation Modern Infrastructure is a SearchITOperations.com publication.

Survey Says 1
Margie Semilof, Editorial Director

Cloud Migration
Nick Martin, Executive Editor
Survey Says 2
Follow
@ModernInfra
Phil Sweeney, Senior Managing Editor
App Delivery on Twitter!

Overheard Linda Koury, Director of Online Design

The Next Big Thing

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In the Zone
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