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Contributed article by Bob Quillin, CEO of CopperEgg

The Hybrid Visibility Imperative

In 2013, public cloud deployments will reach a critical tipping point where the early cloud adopter ranks are joined by an ever-growing set of enterprises who, after cutting their teeth on virtualization and private cloud, begin their inevitable migration of application workloads to the public cloud.  This tipping point has serious implications for IT management architectures that support hybrid visibility and align with software-defined computing models.

1.      Public cloud leads the way for software-defined enterprises

For enterprises looking to embrace software-defined architectures - be that software-defined networks, servers, storage, or data-center - they need look no further than the public cloud for a model that by definition is fully-automated, self-service, and by nature software-defined.  In fact, 2013 is a likely tipping point year where enterprises who have embraced the building blocks of the software-defined enterprise - virtualization, private cloud, automation, self-service - realize that public cloud services like Amazon AWS and Rackspace are a natural, simple, and extremely viable next step in their evolution.

2.      Enterprises moving to the cloud shed legacy management shackles

Legacy management solutions today - be they traditional on-premise software products or open-source tools like Nagios - are essentially a non-factor in the cloud. Why?  Firstly, they were designed for a different world which was static and owned whereas the cloud is elastic and shared, with an inherent high rate of change.  Second, they were designed for an older different consumption model, which consisted of capex-focused, licensed software packages - the cloud instead favors an opex, subscription-based (SaaS) model.  IT tools were also typically designed for single domain-focused experts who resided in siloed IT organizations.  Cloud and virtualization operations requires a cross-functional skill-set - a jack-of-all-trades, hybrid background (e.g., DevOps).  Finally, these tools were designed for a different delivery model that assumed on-site SE's & complex configurations.  The public cloud requires a try-it and buy-it, frictionless onboarding process.

3.      Maturing public cloud deployments demand new and better management

First-generation cloud monitoring tools are folding under the pressures of a maturing user base that now expects enterprise-class monitoring capabilities delivered in a more unified, simple, smart, and fast service.  Early cloud-market management tools have focused on addressing only one part of the problem - just server, just website, just application.  They are fragmented and siloed because that's all the early cloud market needed.  But as the cloud market has matured and business-critical workloads have begun to migrate to the cloud, so have the needs of the operations teams responsible for service availability and performance.  Cloud management 1.0 tools have proven to be too fragmented, error-prone, complex, and slow. The siloed views limit visibility and create false positives as they only see part of the problem. The cloud changes in an instant, so your tools must adapt.  Continuous delivery, agile programming, auto-scaling, elastic compute services drive a new need for real-time.  Existing tools, which were designed for 1-minute or 5-minute averages, wilt under the pressures of scale and speed as cloud use expands.

4.      The hybrid visibility imperative

As these changes take hold, 2013 will be a year of transformation- and thus a year where hybrid visibility is an imperative.  The ability to see across private and public environments will be the only way to guarantee delivery of a unified service that spans across public and private environments.  Specific workloads or applications may require deployments across different cloud providers - once again requiring unified and hybrid visibility.  Finally, the ability to see up and down the cloud stack - from the server up through the web application and back - requires a unified and hybrid approach the spans across layers of a cloud-based architecture.

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About the Author

Bob Quillin is CEO of CopperEgg, a cloud monitoring, SaaS-based solution which provides unified, simple, smart, and fast insight into the performance and availability of hybrid cloud services, servers, and applications.  Bob has held executive positions at a number of virtualization, cloud, & IT infrastructure companies including Hyper9 (acquired by SolarWinds in 2011), EMC Ionix (acquired by VMware in 2010), and nLayers (acquired by EMC in 2005).  For more cloud and server monitoring perspectives check out the CopperEgg blog.