“The network is sexy again.” That cry was echoed all over the Internet in the early days of cloud computing, but was quickly eclipsed by the promise of easy application deployment and a focus on the 'end-user'.
It's time to step back and refocus on what needs to be accomplished.
Lori MacVittie is technical marketing manager for Application Services at F5 Networks.
The call to provide business users with what was described as ways to circumvent unresponsive IT organisations grew louder, while calls for network infrastructure services were quickly drowned out. Of late, the news regarding maturation of cloud computing toward its intended goal - IT as a service - has stagnated. There hasn't really been much in the way of infrastructure services being announced above and beyond load balancing services - for applications.
It's time to step back and refocus on what needs to be accomplished if the top of the technological Mount Everest is ever going to be reached - IT as a service. Business and end-users can't be expected to provision and deploy and eventually manage applications, if they can't simultaneously provision, deploy and manage the application delivery policies - security, performance and availability - required to ensure those applications meet operational and business goals.
Policies as services
Those policies need to be delivered more like services than scripted configurations, and they need to be application-centric. Infrastructure needs to recognise that today's environments and future direction is towards deploying and managing applications, and that means infrastructure management needs to adapt its model to focus on applications rather than components and functions.
Infrastructure services should encapsulate policies - whether security or performance or capacity related - in a way that makes them able to be easily packaged up and deployed along with applications. They need to make sense to business users and developers to whom network- and infrastructure-specific terminology is as foreign as Swahili is to most of the world.
Business users and developers should be able to check a “PCI-Compliance” box when deploying an application, and the requisite policies will subsequently be deployed to the appropriate infrastructure components - whether virtual appliance or hardware, or some mixture in between. Services - infrastructure services - are necessary to enable that level of automation and completeness of deployment.
Enabling services
NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has the least contentious definition of cloud computing to date: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (eg, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
There seems to be, for the most part, a workable set of services addressing servers and applications and storage resources. There is not, however, a workable set of services addressing network resources.
There is load balancing, and some additional services offered around Web application security are starting to be seen, but there's very little in-between - which is to say there's a whole lot of infrastructure (network) resources missing from the services available today.
Part of the reason is the industry and its failure to embrace with enthusiasm the concept of a more services-oriented approach to managing infrastructure. Without the ability for IT - whether at a cloud provider or within an enterprise - to manage infrastructure via services, it is difficult to offer “packages” of infrastructure services encapsulating business and operational goals.
To that end, the industry must step up and proactively provide the means by which infrastructure services can be enabled, integrated and leveraged by IT, such that customers can rapidly provision those services as a part of the deployment process.
Whether the talk is about public or private, off- or on-premise cloud computing, infrastructure services are a necessary next step in the maturation process. Without enabling infrastructure services, efficiently automating operational processes won't be possible. Providers need to rediscover their initial excitement about the network and focus on offering more “network resources” as services.
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