In the past two years, every vendor has packaged its offering with the word Cloud or Cloud Computing in it. I don’t blame them being the buzzword of this decade, though that create a hell of confusion to customers. In many cases that confusion was even against the vendor it self. I mean if you want just to sell a simple hardware box and you put the word Cloud Computing, you might end up confusing the user of what he is buying and leave it all for not understanding what he is exactly getting. Further, It has definitively hurt the real Cloud Computing Vendors.

I have even seen a rising article lately, that try to mark what is a Cloud Computing & what is not Cloud Computing. An Old one that have brought my attention today and got me to write this post is “15 ways to tell its not cloud computing” by James Governor can be read at here. The idea behind the article was to guide people how to eliminate companies who claim to offer Cloud Computing, but has nothing to do with it in reality. The problem with post that it went to extremes that no one in the market today qualify to be a Cloud Computing provider. Below I will show few of the points I disagree with in his list:

1- If you can’t buy it on your personal credit card… it is not a cloud  <== What About Private Cloud Computing?

2- If you know where the machines are… its not a cloud.  <== In most Cloud offering today you will have at least a  proximity in which region or country your workload is being process. Most vendors offer that info in their dashboard. This will even eliminate all the big players including Amazon, VMware, Microsoft, Google. Again, what about Private Cloud?

3- If there is a consultant in the room… its not a cloud <== Hmm this is totally cancel the concept of Private & Hybrid Cloud Computing. How would you design or create your private Cloud without a Consultant. Lol, if this is true then Consultants specialized in Cloud Computing should prepare their CVs. Hmm, you have been warned guys.

4- If you own all the hardware… its not a cloud.  <== Again what about Private Cloud?

5- If it takes 20 slides to explain  <== Hmm, so how large is the slide deck that explain a real Cloud. Maybe I should start making sure my Cloud Computing Presentation is 19 Slides or less.

I don’t deny James expertise in this field, but this is an old post and worth revisiting specially that many people are still hit that post even internally in VMware. Actually this post was forwarded to me internally by a colleague who thing it was quite useful but over looked the short comes of it. I hope James will have some time to update it soon, & I will be dropping him a comment on his blog too. Till then, I thought I will leave this post in case people get confused by James out dated post.

Who said you can only find Cloud in the Sky, I believe start seeing it in IT these days .

I have been lately seeing many tenders in my region that include vCloud Director, but the funny part most of them were purposing vSphere Enterprise Edition. This has alarmed me as I always go back to our partners and ensure they are aware of the features they will lose in vCloud Director when using it with Standard  Switches rather than vDistributed Switches. The sad part, I have discovered most of our partners in this region at least were not aware of it so I thought I will document it in this blog post. Further there is an official VMware KB (KB Article: 1026328) found at:  Virtual switch support for VMware vCloud Director that clearly state: “Although it is supported, VMware recommends that you do not use vSwitches” <== in this statement the KB recommend using Distributed Switches with vCloud Director over Standard switches which is only included in the Enterprise Plus Edition. I just wanted to make sure its clear that its not only me who is saying so.

OK, so why do u need Distributed Switches/Enterprise Plus Licenses when using vCloud Director. I mean you don’t expect me to tell you just to buy them then quit did you? You want the reasons behind it. Here it come:

* Basically without Distributed Switches you will lose important automation features of vCloud Director the main one pointed below:

- All port groups have to be created accordingly on all ESX hosts in advance
- Dynamic provisioning via on-the-fly network pools is not possible
- You will not be able to use vCloud Network Isolation
- You will not be able to use VLAN-Baked Network Pools.

Further, Customers at that price range usually as well can afford moving to Enterprise Plus as the price difference is usually not huge when you buying at scale. Further, when buying Enterprise plus you are not only paying for vCloud Director to function better but paying for all the features below that are worth the difference:

- vDistributed swithces are becoming the standard in vSphere environments today & only available in Enterprise Plus
- Support third party switches like Cisco Nexus 1000v
- Network I/O Control & Storage I/O Control
- Host profiles that will easy the ESX deployment as well ensure compliance.
- It will allow you to use up to 8-Way Virtual machines
- It will remove the 6-cores per CPU & 256GB memory limit on the ESX host.

OK, now shall I start expecting to see more tenders coming out with vSphere Enterprise Plus when pricing for vCloud Director or should I just keep beating it loud with a large drum sticks!! Anyway I hope this will be useful for someone out there.

Are you a user of Quora, FourSquare or Reddit? If so then you might have already experienced the Amazon EC2 Public Cloud service failure. Being a user of two of the above services FourSquare & Reddit I can tell you they were affected on the April 21st, 2011  for over 20 hours for sure. Ok, so what has happened? All these companies are utilizing the Public Cloud offering from Amazon EC2. While things have been good at Amazon EC2 these companies has enjoyed the service, but when someone has decided to trip the wire at the Amazon EC2 at 1:41 a.m PDT April 21st at an AWS (Amazon Web Services) data center in Northern Virginia 100s of companies were affected, but the affect has spread to millions of users as many popular services like FourSquare, Quora, & Reddit has been affected by this major service interruption which has lasted for more than 30 hours. Further, many of these companies has lost a good amount of money due to this interruption that could not be recovered for.

One funny thing (that makes me wonder) I just read at http://mobile.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Will-Amazon-EC2-Outage-Negatively-Affect-Attitudes-Toward-Cloud-Nah-733964/ is the following: “Note, by the way, that this outage does not actually violate their SLA. Their SLA defines unavailability as a lack of external connectivity to EC2 instances, coupled with the inability to provision working instances. In this case, EC2 was just fine by that definition. It was Elastic Block Store [EBS] and Relational Database Service [RDS] which weren’t, and neither of those services have SLAs.” <== The way this SLA was written will teach many of these companies to make sure they read the SLA they sign very carefully the next time, as they will need to explain to their shareholders how they will recover up for the loss caused by this service disruption that Amazon EC2 will not help them recover for as it does not violate their SLA. What an SLA!!!!

Another funny thing I have read at the same blog post above, that Amazon has the right to shutdown your service at their discretion if for any reason they see it necessary or against their policy. By the way most Public Cloud Providers has the same policy, which mean they can out of the blue unplug the wire. Which means to you “You might get shut down [at any time] using the cloud. Just manage it.”. If you are further utilizing a Public Cloud Provider that has no interoperability with other Cloud Providers and where you can’t replicate his run environment at your Private Cloud you will be totally toss. If at least you had a provider which utilize something like VMware vCloud then at least you can go and deploy your infrastructure to another provider or build your own Private Cloud without having much of trouble doing all your coding again from scratch which you would have to do in case of a locked Public Cloud Offering. Actually with the VMware vCloud offering you might already have the catalog require to deploy at a press of a click to another VMware Compatible Cloud which work very well as your back up plan.

The question that will pop up, shall we avoid Cloud Computing? Was Cloud Computing a bad idea all from the start. I mean you add the risk that you are under the mercy of the Cloud Provider & a shared infrastructure when it come to Availability & Security. As well your response to service interruption is totally locked to how the Public Cloud provider response.

I don’t think CIOs will stop approaching Cloud Computing in the future due to the agility & cost benefit of it, but I think they will be more aware of how to choose their Cloud offering. They will make sure they read their Cloud Computing provider SLAs in more depth and ensure it match their required availability/Security needs. They will even look closer at a Hybrid Cloud model, where they have the safety net to run their critical applications back at their private cloud or even at a different compatible cloud provider while their primary Cloud provider service is back to normal. All these elements in my believe will increase the push behind Hybrid Cloud and Cloud offering that allow you the freedom to run across multiple Cloud Providers & across your Private Cloud . Further, it will force Cloud Vendors SLAs to be more clear & protect the Cloud Consumers in a better fashion.