
Recently there has been some momentum in the migration of an application/service’s compute environment from one cloud (private or public) to another (in this context refers to a public cloud provider). Implementing such an architectural strategy of using multiple cloud providers makes sense in the events of:
1. Planning and execution of service resumption due to a disaster
2. Moving your business to a new cloud provider
3. Cost economics and flexibility in the context of moving a private enterprise cloud to public cloud when handling spikes in traffic among other reasons.
When a services’ compute environment is running on multiple clouds hosted by different providers then the immediate needs are:
1. How can such environments be managed efficiently?
2. How can applications or services be provisioned easily across cloud providers?
At last year’s VMWorld conference, VMWare and Citrix announced VDCOS (now called vSphere) and Citrix C3 that support application delivery and orchestration services for applications/services hosted in a cloud. (See my coverage here. The visual representation of this announcement and how this would fit into an enterprise is depicted in the architectural diagram above). In addition to vSphere and C3, there are two more great services: Appistry Cloud IQ Manager and Cloudkick, that attempt to answer these challenges of easy cloud management, service provisioning, cloud environment migration and configuration management (currently Appistry IQ Manager supports service provisioning, cloud environment migration and configuration management). Mentioned below is a brief summary of their offerings.
Cloudkick Offerings:
1. Cloudkick provides a single pane for server management called a virtual control center.
2. Alert when a server is unavailable. The delivery of alerts can be through email or voicemail.
3. Provides analytics on network bandwidth, load averages and other system related performance metrics.
4. Currently supports Amazon EC2 and Slicehost cloud providers. However, the company plans to add more providers to its list.
5. Service is Free.
Appistry Cloud IQ Manager Offerings:
1. Offers more powerful features such as migrate existing applications to be packaged and deployed to a cloud without rearchitecture.
2. Application life cycle management (i.e. start, stop and update) across multiple instances in a cloud.
3. Provides a single rich GUI based console to manage applications and the cloud.
4. Enables easy creation of private cloud environments.
5. Allows an API which can be integrated for alerting.
6. Currently supports cloud providers such as: Amazon, GoGrid and Skytap.
As TechcrunchIT mentions here “as technology companies roll out their cloud platforms, like Microsoft will be doing soon with its platform, Azure, and businesses begin to become increasingly reliant on the cloud, these management tools will become even more useful. And Cloudkick could gain good traction in this space if they integrate their application with more than just two types of platforms.” However, it makes me wonder when migrating from one public cloud to another, would the data transfer between them be optimal? In the event of a private cloud moving to a public cloud, such limitations can be addressed using, for example Citrix Repeater (formerly Citrix WANScaler).




