Making Sense of Public Cloud Investments

The public cloud infrastructure services (Iaas) market, according to Gartner's estimation is reaching $60 billion in 2019 and is growing at 27% YoY (fastest growing cloud services segment) from the previous year. Assuming Asia contributes 25% of the global share, turns the region into a critical geo for cloud vendors to battle for market leadership. 

However, cloud practitioners in Asia are still somewhat battling with what is considered as decade old cloud myths evolving around security, compliance, IT control and short term ROIs when conversing with regional customers riding on conventional structures and work cultures. This includes financial institutions, communication service providers, retailers, manufacturers and other asset intensive industries.

While these are all valid concerns, over the years premium cloud vendors have more than proven that their infrastructure and platform services (IaaS, PaaS) are superior to any single institutional  environment in terms of performance, security, reliability and overall economics to sustain just about any type of workloads. The public cloud values are now evolving rapidly with introduction of newer, advanced services in opensource databases, artificial intelligence, low code coding, and running mission critical workloads, enabling businesses to gain better control of operations as they cut waste, optimise performance, develop the much needed new capabilities and differentiators faster than ever. 

Open-source Database Services

Businesses have been dabbling with open-source databases (as well as open-source operating systems, libraries and tools) even before cloud computing services emerged and was aware of the potential to free organisations from growing commercial database licensing burdens. However, managing these open-source databases required additional training, operational and maintenance resources, apart from the unpredictable fixes and releases from the open source community. These issues limited the usage of open-source databases such as PosgreSQL to a small number of non critical, in-house development projects and applications in the past. 

This scenario changed in the recent years as cloud computing companies started to offer fully managed open-source database services such as PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL and many others. Businesses start to increase adoption overnight by consuming cloud based open-source database services for existing and new applications while gaining new efficiencies, never possible before. The polyglot nature of cloud native development, where multiple types of databases and models are deployed in an application composed of micro-services and API calls only drives this trend further. 

Popularity of open-source databases according to DB Engine Ranking site, is about to converge with commercial databases in 2019 or in the early parts 2020. 

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning

Explore pre-trained ML models

If new to artificial intelligence and its sub domains machine learning, deep learning and transfer learning, take advantage of the various pre-trained models offered by public cloud vendors such as Google, AWS and Microsoft to perform prediction, classifications, natural language processing (NLP), speech processing, computer vision (video, image and object recognition), decision support and planning tasks. 

Start by experimenting solutions to business problems while inflating returns on organisational data assets. This provides an opportunity for the business to quickly reap benefits from readily available models where the team need only prepare data, select features and train the model for required tasks (e.g predictions, classifications).  Trained models can then be deployed with other production applications and systems through APIs to apply learnings on new data samples.

Building custom models..

As the internal team gain experience and get familiarise with ML projects, commence a process to create step-by-step AI playbook to define and prioritise business problems that can be addressed with AI, data preparation, algorithms selection, and developing a model to make predictions. This exercise should involve critical members from business, data science and the engineering teams, ideally aligned to addressing growth challenges, resources optimisation, innovation and enhancing customer experience. 

Machine learning and deep learning frameworks such as Tensorflow, Pytorch, MXNET, Keras, Caffe, Scikit, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit and Theano, that comes readily packaged with interface, libraries, tools, pre-built and optimised components facilitates fast development of AI models without getting into the details of underlying algorithms and complex architectures. 

Pick a cloud vendor for ML-as-a-service that best fit your needs...

Top public cloud vendors such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba and Google provide support to most of the frameworks mentioned above for custom building models apart from their pre trained model offers for common business problems. New developers can benefit from starting with frameworks such as Keras and delve deeper into Tensorflow or other suitable frameworks as they get accustomed with the building blocks and programming languages.

Develop cloud native applications faster ...

Today a challenge sparks an idea, an idea turns into a prototype and a prototype transforms into a multi-platform first release in just matter of days and weeks. Aside from core infrastructure services, cloud vendors offer various advanced services ranging from devop, language SDKs, container orchestration, serverless computing, no to low code development platforms (both proprietary and open-source), APIs, code libraries to ready templates to help organisations accelerate application development arising from sudden business needs. 

Most post cloud applications are series of micro-services connected to one another via APIs leveraging languages, databases and code bases most suitable for the required function and the supporting technical environment.

No to Low Code Platforms

In addition, low code platforms such as Mendix, Outsystems, Google App Maker, Appian, and Microsoft Power App empowers traditional developers, IT professionals and to a certain degree the average business users to accelerate software delivery for business use cases made up of common features and components by simply utilising existing templates, forms, objects, drag and drop of prebuilt features.

Ensure performance of mission critical applications....

Learn which of your mission critical applications are suffering from intermittent or persistent performance issues affecting business processes critical to productivity, customer experience and revenue activities. Cloud vendors offer various services and pricing plans to optimise business applications from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and others where data grows exponentially with transactions in time.

Exploring public cloud offers for the aforementioned type of applications can reveal credible areas of savings, operational simplification, performance improvement, speedy delivery of new business requirements, higher utilisation, improved security and compliance. Keeping a revisable record of requirements and working with cloud vendors to formulate cloud contracts to efficiently counter all planned and unplanned workloads can free internal resources for myriad of higher impact business activities.

Know values, learn constraints and strategise for long term...

Ultimately cloud values can vary significantly from business to business depending on the nature of operational model and the overall ecosystem. The four areas mentioned here are general enough for most sectors, though some businesses might benefit immensely from other emerging tech such as augmented reality, IOT, 3D or bigdata platform services.

In addition, identifying constraints that prohibit enterprise architectures from extracting full potential of public cloud eliminates aimless unproductive explorations. For instance legacy apps on rigid centralised architectures that may not gain much efficiencies when moved to the cloud.

Finally having a solid long term strategy, helps. For instance all new development and deployment to take the 'Cloud First' approach, or maintaining a hybrid cloud environment with only unpredictable workloads moving to public cloud or 'Cloud Only' approach where the internal teams build in-house brokerage capabilities to fully monitor its environments on multiple public clouds and perform various optimisation as needed.

How to Choose a Public Cloud ?

This is a popular question, especially for startup and SMB leaderships, whom may not have an advance tech team at their disposal to support with queries and selections when picking a public cloud that returns the most value for new development or migrate existing workloads. Please note that these questions and methods are skewed towards screening IT infrastructure and platform service provider and not so much the Saas provider (we might cover that in another piece of cheat sheet separately).

Ask Questions
Here are couple of things (in no particular order), that your team can use to prepare before meeting the service providers.  

Please note that it's a really bad idea to meet them unprepared, as it provides a white canvas opportunity for the vendor to paint anything they like. It is highly recommended that you avoid such situations. 

Here are the questions/ areas worth exploring;

1. A list of current IT operations (e.g. applications, tools, analytics, security, data-warehouse and etc.) and technologies in place (e.g Operating systems, databases, development tools and languages, security, infrastructure or even other clouds in place).
2. A list of projected/strategic business activities and their automation/digitalisation needs (e.g mobile app, big data analytics, buyer & seller optimisation, etc.)
3. Customisability of compute and memory requirements (in other words, how much control do you have on your VM or VMs).
4. Pro and cons of owning the PaaS level...
5. Standard tech questions - Interoperability, portability,  new app development cycle, security, redundancy, backup and recovery features.
6. The type and size of technology eco-system that the cloud provider connects to - here you are simply looking for three things; suitability of the technology to your operation; standardisation and; provider that connects with a larger eco-system of technologies (e.g Hadoop, ML, AI, Blockchain, Mobile App Platform and a host of other opensource pieces).
7. Pricing mechanism and projections for on-boarding; utilisation blocks (e.g by minutes, hours, monthly, yearly, types of workload - predictive and unpredictive); exit or off-boarding (be aware that some vendors charge even during off-boarding to migrate data and other intellectual assets off of their platform – this happens when you complete contractual term and don’t plan to renew);
8. Discount and rebate applications - when you get them, and when you don't (ask both questions)?
9. What is the lock-in period (e.g 1 to 3 years). What happens if you exit prematurely. What is the unnatural discontinuation cost?
10. What service guarantee does the vendor provide (e.g. SLA, compliance, security)?
11. What happens when vendor fail to deliver service (system performance, security, data, compliance)”according to contractual term? 
12. What support procedures are in place when a support request is registered?
13. What if you need to scale ? How quickly you can scale the needed footprint?
14. What about trainings and upskill activities?
15. What SMB focused programs does the vendor have in place? Some service providers might have special programs for you to mingle with other users in your category and connect. This can be an added bonus to your business as you can tap onto the knowledge and resources of a wider network.

Request for a Pilot Test

if you are happy with the information gathered through the pre-meeting research and cloud salesperson's answers to aforesaid questions, move on to a test request for the tools and  platform services in question.  Scope the test areas according to your procurement needs to stay on course with your current needs. Look out for performance, usability, flexibility, scalability, security and inter-operability results to support and corroborate information you gathered (unless the test fail to do so).

Tap Talks in the Grapevine
It’s a good idea at this point to fraternise with other fellow startups and SMBs who may have already been using the services first hand.  Their experience could be a valuable addition of information to your decisions. Though, when collecting information from informal sources such as this, be aware of the timelines - a problem or disadvantage that existed a year ago may not apply anymore as cloud companies improve (especially the largest 3 or 4) at a rapid pace.

What is a Satisfactory Outcome?
What are you looking to map with these initial questions and explorative activities?

1. Your IT computing and operational requirement based on business roadmap.
2. Suitability of the service provider/s and their offerings to support your business and future growth.
3. Good understanding of tools and services recommended by vendor before you embark on them.
4. A clear idea on pricing matters; discounts and rebates applications; contractual terms.
5. Outline or scope of duties and responsibilities between you and your vendor in regards to your IT footprint. 
6. Cost of discontinuation of business relationship upon completion of contractual terms.
7. Cost and consequences of discontinuation of business relationship due to premature termination of contract.
8. Your rights when service provider fails you? e.g service delivery, compliance, security or data breach.
9. Exit and migration path to other clouds.

Finally, a piece of useful advice to stay productive and avoid frustrations. Expect for contact points to change at anytime while dealing with vendors or any external parties for that matter. As such, it would be wise to document all requirements, arrangements and agreements to terms, contractual and non. This will help you save time in the reestablishment and reinstatement of such interactions which looses sight due to change of contact points.

In addition, get feedback from both business(finance included) and technical team members on the selection before concluding.

Happy Screening!!!!

Google Summit 2018 - Kuala Lumpur

Overall a good event but was crowded with some 2000 people at venue, making conversation and moving around the event hall, real hard.

As expected, every stream emphasised on artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning infusion in Google products such as G Suite and various other cloud offerings. Server-less computing or Google Cloud Function range of services for building application back ends (IOT, api gateways, and etc), real time data processing, virtual assistants, chat bots, image analysis and text analysis for different use cases was another area of highlight.

Tools, documentation and support for developer community was shared with various strategies to cut development work, transition to micro-services architecture, adopt containerisation and get solutions to market a lot quickly.

There seem to be quite an uptake and interest from enterprise customers too, with many re-platforming traditional applications or deploying new applications on GCP. Local CSP, Celcom Axiata seem to have moved their Drupal based portal, e-commerce system Magento, analytics, and a few other business applications onto GCP. AirAsia and Maxis, each presented a successful use case as well.

Startups as suspected, are starting their business journey by default on public clouds such as GCP and almost all that presented are early stage players. Though, I was really hoping for a late stage startup story, to learn more on how growing organisations are transitioning and juggle between public cloud and in-house IT footprint.

There were no mention of interoperability or portability of solutions in any track, though RedHat did have a slot to talk about their cloud management and application packaging solution including Ansible Tower.


As for me personally, I didn't discover anything particularly new, but then again, I am part of at least 12 different global discussion groups on FB that keeps me on track with the tech world.

However, understanding how Malaysian customers are seeing success with GCP made it worthwhile. Though, customers seem to be sticking to proven use cases alone and I did not come across anyone innovating a disruptive new service just yet. Many spoke about CapEX, risk reduction, business relationship and time to market as key drivers and values.

None of the customers made any reference of internal cloud teams responsible for drawing their cloud strategies and risk management measures or exit plans to protect against vendor lock in, cost spiral or security concerns. Perhaps we will see those topics to appear in the coming years as adoption matures and customers start to ramp up internal strategies.

Lastly, there were 3 women speakers that I noticed - one from Google and the rest from customer organisation. Among attendees too, the number of women can be counted.

None of the tracks I attended accommodated Q&A somehow (data insight track) which was a big letdown. Perhaps, this was done to keep to the schedule.

Application Portability when Switching Clouds

Every business develops and runs a fair bit of custom code applications to automate value chain delivery to customers, partners, employees, and even supplier interactions. Highly progressive businesses are driven by data which means these businesses continuously build, integrate, stage and deploy custom code to improve a range of outcomes namely process automation, user experience, operational visibility, compliance, and governance at dizzying speed.

Cloud services both IaaS and PaaS are natural choices today for development teams when it comes to realising business services internal and external. In fact, Rightscale recently cited in their ‘State of the Cloud Report’, that in average 48% of SMB workloads run on public clouds.

While healthy public cloud adoption is projected to continue among SMBs at slightly higher pace than enterprises, there is no denying that decision loops concerning the tools and cloud services selected are primarily dependent on the development models (continuous integration / continuous delivery) in practice and often comes with some degree of compromise made between available budget, source code control, speed of development, application portability and interoperability in the future.

Requirements and priorities change

Business priorities change as product or service adoption increases, market factors open new opportunities, competitive landscape tightens or new innovations enter the playing field, all of which involves scaling at a pace never imagined in the pre-internet era. Public clouds large and small, without a doubt power millions of businesses to build solutions quickly and cost effectively with a lot less overhead to meet growth objectives. However, a judiciously selected cloud partner today may cease to be relevant in a future point.

Over time, businesses may need to reassess relationship with existing cloud providers for various reasons ranging from  cost optimisation, security, governance, vendor lock-in, overall performance, cloud bursting to new technology requirement for AI, IOT, VR/AR/MR, 3D and mobile, making application portability a key concern for businesses wishing to switch cloud providers.

Switching public cloud providers in alignment with business goals

Many ISVs for instance may have chosen to develop and deploy new age applications such as IOT for instance, on a certain PaaS service to reduce cost of building the infrastructure and platform themselves. As business grows, the once economically viable solution begins to blow out of proportion financially as usage base explodes. In this case the business is left with two scenarios; one they could look for another provider with similar or equivalent PaaS services at better price points; the second is to choose a IaaS provider and construct their own PaaS layer for more control over application dependencies (e.g. data services, runtime, OS, networking, encryption, and virtualisation).

Application re-platforming processes and routines differs cloud to cloud

The cloud platform on which an application runs and DevOp environment determine how tools (e.g. Ansible, Chef, Puppet and etc.), automation and standardisations are applied in simplifying deployment when migrating applications from one cloud provider to another.

While a standard process perhaps can be established to automate packaging, conduct optimisation, generate VM or container images and orchestrate deployment artefacts, the knowledge sets or expertise involved varies from one cloud platform to another. Though, there are several steps and best practices that can be adopted by DevOp to ensure portability of applications and data today.

Choose cloud providers that support Open Virtualisation Format

Chose to work with cloud service providers that support widely accepted application packaging formats such as the ‘Open Virtualisation Format (OVF)’, formulated and recommended by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). This method standardises packaging of virtual machine based software regardless of cloud platforms which means migrating to a new environment or multiple clouds is swift and resource efficient.

Containerise applications

Another best practice that is gaining momentum recently, is to re-platform applications running on virtual machine instances to a container based platform such as Docker. Containerisation packs application code and all dependencies in a container image that is a repeatable artefact and multiple containers can be deployed on a single VM sharing the same resources. Aside, from the obvious administrative efficiencies and cost savings, this method is ideal to support microservices development architecture (or polyglot architecture) and distributed applications on serverless cloud instances and virtual machines.

Container orchestration and cluster management solutions such as Kubernetes and Docker Swarm facilitates orchestration, clustering, scheduling and integration of large number of container images and typically is sufficient to scale applications as needed. Consider both tools and a proof of concept with each technology, using real-world workloads.

Open standard interfaces and APIs

Open APIs and vendor specific APIs (extensions of SOA architectures) allow users to move data and expose services between clouds while masking complexities behind any one interface (e.g. functional, admin, business). In a real world situation the use of vendor specific APIs are unavoidable even in a ‘open standards friendly’ DevOp environment, especially when the business footprint in a particular cloud is significant.

API management is mandatory in maintaining balance and isolating refitting work when necessary. Security concerns should be maintained throughout the linkages by deploying third party access rights management and other tools, as data securely travels between clouds.

Adopt multi-cloud management platform

Another method to facilitate cloud migration is to implement a suitable multi-cloud management platform that integrates multiple public cloud environments (e.g. AWS, GCP, Azure, Digital Ocean and etc.) including private clouds. This creates an overlay that masks underlying platform differences that allows for easier movement of applications, workflows, and data.

Build own PaaS

Vendor lock-in and portability issues are higher in PaaS services than in IaaS. One option to reduce such reliance is to build an in-house PaaS with tools such as Dokku and Flynn, an open source platform solution for everything that is needed for running applications in production.

Conclusion

Portability and interoperability between clouds is a journey that begins from the point a business on-boards its first cloud service.

Containerising applications, automating deployment processes across multiple clouds, building tools, creating a controllable PaaS layer or at least selecting one that has an equivalent alternative, leveraging open technologies wherever possible, using standard APIs and abstracting integration layers are some of the best practices that can be adopted throughout a cloud lifecycle to ensure smooth exit when need arises. These same best practices reduces vendor lock-in,  unexpected cost spirals, time and material needed to move workloads across public clouds.

Applications and systems with below average portability scores simply don't make the cut as a good migration target to other clouds. In some cases, it might be even easier to just recreate them on a new platform.

Migration processes too must be planned and executed in systematic manner with necessary tooling and automations in place to create a repetitive migration asset that includes the learnings that can be shared with the entire team.

Last but not the least, when porting over to the new cloud, systems must be fully tested and stabilised prior to terminating the old environment in ensuring business continuity.