MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

This morning as I sit patiently waiting for someone to help with an issue I had deploying a new version of an application to a test instance in the cloud, I had a few minutes to think about tooling. 

It’s hard these days to ignore some of the progress companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, GoGrid and others are making towards the broader cloud computing concept.  All of them are making great progress towards moving of the core functionality into the cloud.  In fact, I believe it won’t be long till the debate is not around the core capabilities but around the tooling. 

By tooling I mean how you manage your cloud assets and gain insight into what is happening inside the cloud.  When running in the cloud we give up some level of control and in some cases are abstracted from the low level day to day operations.  That’s all great until something breaks, then the black box concept becomes challenging because you can’t simply do the same type of troubleshooting as you would an on-premise type application.

I’m not suggesting changing the level of abstraction to make it less of a black box from a day to day perspective.  I think the idea that patching and such just happens makes a ton of sense and keeps the focus on running a business and not on running servers.  I do think however, that tools need to be built to provide a higher level of operational transparency .

These tools would help bridge the gap between those knowledgeable of the application and those knowledgeable of the cloud platform they are running on.  This concept is not new, any co-location service that manages servers for an organization deals with this issue today – but as service offerings become more abstracted from the low level server operating environments to more service based offerings, this gap becomes more pronounced.

The most immediate need for better tooling is around trouble shooting and being able to get more insight into what’s happening inside your black box.  Being able to communicate that to a support person in a secure, track able method by simply clicking a button, not cutting and pasting and then trying to figure out how to transfer secure details into forums and other traditional public support vendors are used to providing for their products.

Performance is another area as cloud computing becomes more monetized, it will become more important to be able to slice and dice your service usage.  As using these services becomes part of the day to day operations of businesses so will getting hands around capacity planning and cost estimation.

Cloud services won’t be for every application, but that should be a conscious decision not one because you didn’t take the time to understand what’s there. 

As I said in the opening, I think that tooling will be the differentiator for cloud services as we move past the wave of getting the services up and running.  Tooling is also the first thing you start to notice as you start kicking the tires.  So as more people get interested in the cloud, I expect so does the demand for tools.

Think about what type of tools and data you want made available  from a cloud provider and send them your suggestions!