Notes from Interop '09: Amidst the Hype, A Practical View of Cloud Computing Emerges

The word ‘hype’ might actually be an understatement when it comes to the subject of cloud computing. This week at Interop there's lots of talk about the cloud with very little discussion so far of the common challenges of making cloud a reality. And, certainly no roadmap for implementing the safeguards that businesses and government will require before moving critical apps into the cloud.

Although new alliances have emerged promising to deliver standards to the world of cloud computing, still plenty of questions remain. We’ve raised a number of those questions about testing cloud infrastructures here on the BreakingPoint Labs blog, so I set out to find those answers at Interop and the Enterprise Cloud Summit. It's still early in the event, but far from answering those questions my experience has simply uncovered new issues. Questions continue to abound around performance, security and how to develop sound strategies for embarking upon a cloud initiative.

Talking with Univa UD CEO Jason Liu at Interop, it seemed to come down to this simple advice: "Be pragmatic and smart when looking at the cloud."

“We encourage companies to take a practical approach to the cloud. Don’t move all your applications or services to the cloud, look at them strategically and decide which ones to move today. Work in an incremental manner, including private and public cloud usage, and you are going to learn what works best.”

Univa UD has been around this track before as the company was formed ten years ago by some of the original innovators in the world of grid computing. Today’s cloud computing movement is a natural extension of grid of course, but we have now seen ten years of frustrations due to a lot of sizzle, but no real meat. According to Liu, cloud is finally taking off the past few months primarily because of the adoption of virtualization. Liu broke it down by illustrating three key buckets of companies:

1. Companies who haven’t adopted virtualization.
2. Companies who are beginning to implement virtualization.
3. Companies who have implemented virtualization and are now planning a strategic cloud initiative.

In his estimation the first group is fairly small and shrinking every day, probably around 10%. Group 2 is the largest, perhaps around 60% and we are left with 30% starting to stare down the cloud. But even the companies in groups 2 and 3 continue to face challenges in getting it all implemented and this is where Liu really preaches Univa’s pragmatic approach.

The large undertaking of virtualization is certainly a tipping point for cloud computing and something that will eventually lead more and more companies towards the cloud. Liu sees this as a 36-month track, allowing vendors during that time to create and thoroughly test the hardware and provisioning infrastructures--a more realistic timetable than most vendors will claim, and probably necessary when it comes to ensuring the safeguards required to inspire user confidence.

Virtualization is the foundation for cloud computing while performance and security are critical factors for its success, meaning a pragmatic approach must include testing and validating virtualized servers with real network traffic. There have been a number of vendor claims about “testing the virtualized data center” this week at Interop, but a closer look at those products reveal the same critical flaw - they are still focused on only simulating Layer 2/3 and HTTP traffic. The reality remains that companies run much more over their networks.

Network traffic today is a complex high volume mix of Layer 2-7 traffic. It’s time to take a hard look at test vendors and examine the traffic those tools are using to “test” the components of the cloud infrastructure. Does that traffic mix contain the common applications running on the network? Does it represent realistic usage patterns? Can it emulate the number of sessions seen at peak load? And, critically important for the cloud, does it contain a wide variety of security strikes? Certainly, to adhere to any level of truth in testing, the traffic used for this purpose should at the very least include virtualization components such as the VMware VMotion protocol. At the other end of the spectrum, shouldn't it be able to emulate Web services and other enterprise applications? This level of realism is what is needed to evaluate the true performance and effectiveness of cloud servers and the cloud infrastructure itself. Only then will cloud services inspire the confidence business leaders require to trust their critical data and applications to cloud vendors.

A pragmatic approach to entering the cloud is a wise move and Jason Liu of Univa UD should know since they have seemingly stood the test of time and today continue helping companies actually make the cloud a reality. Sitting and talking with Liu during Interop it was apparent that the same pragmatic approach must be taken when testing the infrastructure elements of the cloud. In order to make the cloud a reality, testing tool providers must take a page out of Liu's playbook and come to the table with practical solutions that emulates a real network for real testing, not simply marketing hype.

Update: Get instant access to BreakingPoint's step-by-step Server Load Balancer Testing Methodology.

Posted by Kyle Flaherty

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