system level as well as the application level. The monitoring system’s rich data collection mechanisms are then fed as inputs to the service providers’ processes so that they can manage service-level compliance. A rich reporting capability to define and present the SLA compliance data is essential for enterprise customers. Typically, SLAs comprise of some number of service-level objectives (SLOs). These SLOs are then rolled up to compute the overall SLA. It pays to remember the overall SLA depends on the entire value delivery system, from the vendor’s hardware and software to the SLOs for the vendor’s support and operations services offerings. To provide real value to the enterprise customer, the cloud provider must negotiate with the customer to deliver their services at the appropriate level of abstraction to meet the customer’s needs, and then manage those services to an overall application SLA.

The role of automation. In order to obtain high quality and minimize costs the value-based cloud must rely on a high degree of automation. During the early days of SaaS clouds, when the author was building the NetSuite data center, they had over 750 physical servers that were divided into three major functions: Web delivery, business logic, and database. Machine-image templates were used to create each of the servers in each tier. However, as time went on, the systems would diverge from the template image because of ad hoc updates and fixes. Then, during a deployment window, updates would be applied to the production site, often causing it to break, which resulted in a violation of end-customer SLAs. As a consequence, extensive effort was applied to finding random causes for the failed updates. The root cause was that the QA tests were run on servers that were exact copies of the templates; however, some of the production systems were unique, which caused faults during the deployment window. These types of issues can break even the tight-est of deployment processes. The moral of the story is to never log in to the boxes. This can only be accomplished by automating all routine system administration activities.

There are several data-center-run
book-automation tools on the market
today for use in corporate data centers.
These tools allow for the complete au-
tomation of every aspect of the server
life cycle from creation of a virtual in-
frastructure through scaling, service-
level management, and disposal of
the systems when the customer has
finished with them. While automation
has made significant progress in the
corporate data center, it is only in its
infancy in the cloud. Yet, to replace the
corporate data center, Cloud 2.0 must
include automation. This capability al-
lows both the cloud provider and the
customer to obtain some unprecedent-
ed benefits:

Betting your Business on cloud 2.0
By offering value beyond simply pro-
viding CPU cycles, the cloud provider
is becoming a part of the end custom-
ers’ business. This requires a level of
trust that is commensurate with hir-
ing an employee or outsourcing your
operations. Do you know who you are
hiring? This vendor-partner must un-
derstand what the enterprise holds
important, and must be able to oper-
ate in a way that will support the cloud
end customer’s business. By taking on
the role of operations services provider
to the enterprise, the vendor enables
the end customer to gain all of the
benefits of cloud computing without
the specialized skills needed to run a
production data center. However, it
is unrealistic to expect outsourced IT
that eliminates the need for in-house
staffing to be delivered at today’s cloud
computing prices.

Related articles on queue.acm.org

CTO Roundtable: Cloud Computing

Mache Creeger

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1536633

Building Scalable Web Services

Tom Killalea

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1466447

Describing the Elephant: The Different Faces of IT as Service

Ian Foster and Steven Tuecke

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1080874

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Dave Durkee ( [e-mail]) is founder and technical director of enki, a managed cloud computing services provider in mountain view, ca. durkee has over 25 years of experience in it infrastructure, networking, business applications development, and executive corporate management. he has held several senior management it positions, including cio of a successful hosted erP application service provider, netsuite.com © 2010 acm 0001-0782/10/0500 $10.00