Garbage in the Cloud ZapFlash WP

8/2/2019 Garbage in the Cloud ZapFlash WP

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Copyright 2012 ZapThink, A Dovl Technologies Company. All rights reserved.

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ZapThink, a Dovl Technologies Company 7918 Jones Branch Dr #100 McLean VA 22102 [email protected] www.zapthink.com

GarbageintheCloudBy Jason Bloomberg, President, ZapThink, A Dovl Technologies CompanyOn two occasions I have been asked,"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you

put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come

out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of

ideas that could provoke such a question.

Charles Babbage, 1864

The long-standing computer science principle of garbage in,

garbage out (GIGO) is so fundamental to IT that it predates digital

computing by almost a century. And yet here we are in the twenty-

first century, moving to the Cloud, and Babbages exasperated response is no truer or more

on point. For not only is the Cloud a magnet for all sorts of garbage, it is also generating new

garbage at a brisk clip.Uploading Garbage to the CloudIn todays frantic rush to move to the Cloud, too many organizations are failing to ask what

they should move to the Cloud. Instead, they envision the Cloud as some kind of huge,

nebulous server in the sky, a perfect receptacle for whatever they have on-premise. Got

email? Put it in the Cloud! Got data? Put your data in the Cloud, the bigger the better!

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AboutZapThinkForoveradecade,ZapThinkhascutthroughthehypesurroundingagilearchitecturesfortheenterprise.ZapThinkforgedapathf

organizations planning and implementing ServiceOriented Architecture and Cloud Computing worldwide. Now, as a Dov

Technologiescompany,ZapThinkcontinues todrive innovation inSOA,EA,andCloudwith itsmarket leadingLicensedZapThin

ArchitectSOA&Cloudcourseandglobalarchitectureadvisoryservices.


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Running business processes on-premise? Move them to the Cloud!

Not so fast. Lets slow down a bit and consider the ramifications of moving too quicklyand

haphazardlyto the Cloud.

Unclean data This is the obvious example, pure GIGO. If your current on-premisedata are unclean, say you have inconsistent customer demographic information, or

obsolete product information, or any other data quality challenge, it goes without

saying that moving such information to the Cloud wont do your data, or your

business, any good. Instead, think of moving your data to the Cloud as though you

were moving your elderly parents to a condo. Its a wonderful excuse to finally dig

through the layers of detritus so that you only move data that are clean, accurate, and

valuable to the business.

Spaghetti code you may be eyeing that old custom-coded legacy app as a primeCloud candidate. Its too slow, it doesnt scale well, and its a bear to integrate now,

so wont the Cloud automatically make it fast, scalable, and easy to integrate? Sorry

to burst your bubble. If youre focusing on an IaaS approach, what youll find is that

spaghetti code is every bit as intractable in the Cloud as it is on-premise. What about

PaaS? Chances are that old code wont run at all. Todays PaaS environments

expect and enforce a certain level of code quality.

Obsolete and Cloud-unfriendly business processes Does this sound familiar? Thebusiness asks IT to automate a set of processes, but states unequivocally that the

processes are fine the way they are. Automate them but dont change them. After all,

weve been doing things the same way for years. Why change now? Yes, the

business often says that, but seasoned IT veterans have long realized that the

business neveractually means it. When the business asks IT to touch a process,

there is always at least an implied requirement to try to make it better: faster, more

streamlined, better aligned with the underlying business need.

Moving business process implementations to the Cloud raises the stakes in this complex

dance between business and technology, because the Cloud offers a wealth of new

opportunities for improving processes. Furthermore, how users interact with Cloud-based

assets is often fundamentally different from how users interact with traditional enterprise


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apps. Any organization that has moved from an older CRM app (or no CRM app at all) to

Salesforce.com has learned this lesson first hand. But Salesforce is merely a harbinger of

greater change to come. One of the main reasons Salesforce has been so successful is

because they offer their clients new ways of conducting businessin other words, better

processes. Any SaaS solution should build on their example.

Generating N ew G arbage in the CloudThe garbage problem doesnt end with garbage you might put in the Cloud. The Cloud also

presents numerous opportunities to generate new kinds of garbage.

Zombie instances its so easy and cheap now for anyone in your organization tospawn their own Cloud instances, including virtual machines, storage instances, and

more. Furthermore, such instances are elastic: need more of them? The Cloud is only

too happy to oblige. But what happens when youre done with them? Youre

supposed to delete them. After all, elasticity works in both directions. All too often,

however, instances that have served their purpose are left around like so much space

junk. After a while, nobody remembers what theyre for or if they still have something

important in them. The last thing you want to do is delete an instance with valuable

data or code on it. So to play it safe, you leave it around. Forever. Your Cloud

provider is only too happy to keep billing you for these Zombie instances.

Data with no provenance any Antiques Roadshow aficionado knows that antiqueswith provenance are more valuable than those without. The same goes for your data.

Do you know if the data youre working with are the latest version? Do you know they

havent been tampered with? If not, then those data are worse than useless, since

they may be incorrect, or even worse, keeping them around may violate any number

of regulations. Here again the elasticity of the Cloud works against you.

Man ual or poorly abstracted configurations Lets say youve built a sophisticatedCloud app based on elastic VM instances. If you need more, simply provision more.

But then lets say some admin somewhere in your IT shop goes into one of these

instances and changes a config file in order to get an app to run on that instance.

Now you have no way to update your instances without breaking your appand if


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that admin didnt tell anybody about the reconfiguration, then tracking down the

problem will present a time-consuming challenge.

Simply creating a static image file to generate new VM instancesand keeping rogue

admins from monkeying with themwont solve the problem, because there is more to your

app than the instances. Instead, you need a next generation configuration management

approach that automates configuration for the Cloud. See Chef or Puppet for an indication

where this market is going. (You can expect a ZapFlash on Cloud configuration management

in the near future.)

Cloud-unfriendly architecture choices We covered one example of this problem inour ZapFlash The Secret to a RESTful Cloud: stateful Cloud instances. Essentially,

inappropriate state information is just more garbage in the Cloud. Another example

would be inappropriate transactionality in the Cloud. Cloud Computing lends itself to

particular ways of architecting applications, and attempting to shoehorn the wrong

architectural approach into the Cloud is about as effective as Cinderellas stepsisters

efforts with the glass slipper.

The ZapThink TakeHow do you avoid garbage in the Cloud? Architecture is a large part of the answer, of

course, but governanceis equally important. Organizations should establish and enforce

Cloud-centric policies as well as extending current IT governance to the Cloud. With great

power comes great responsibility, and the Cloud offers enormous new power to many

different roles within the IT organization. The Cloud is fraught with pitfalls. Without sufficient

governance, youre bound to fall in one.

It is also important to note that the issues in this ZapFlash apply equally to private as well as

public Clouds. Organizations generally realize that public Clouds present numerous

governance challenges, and look to private Clouds because they are ostensibly less risky.

But such a stance offers little more than a false sense of securityone that may backfire, if

organizations assume that in the absence of proper architecture and governance, a private

Cloud is the better choice. Dont wait to implement adequate Cloud governance until after

youve run into these problems. Governance should be an integral part of any Cloud strategy,

beforeyou move to the Cloud.

Garbage in the Cloud ZapFlash WP

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