The New Cloud Management Wheel Is Here

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

If you ever wondered what cloud management means and what it encompasses, Gartner has the answer. The newest cloud management framework has just been published as part of the research “Solution Criteria for Cloud Management Tools” (paywall).

Cloud management is made of seven functional areas and five cross-functional attributes. The functional areas are specific to one use case, whereas the cross-functional attributes aim at broader goals that are common to multiple use cases. The outer ring of the “wheel” in the below figure below represents the functional areas, and the inner ring characterizes the cross-functional attributes.

The research also “double clicks” on each category and provides a total of 201 capabilities that organizations should possess to manage public and private clouds. These capabilities are presented in form of requirements, which can be used to evaluate and select cloud management tools. The research comes in form of a toolkit that clients can download and customize to power their request-for-proposals (RFPs) efforts.

Major updates to the research include:

  • Shift from platforms to tools: Although cloud management platforms (CMPs) are still out there, they’re no longer top of mind of clients according to our inquiries. In the last couple of years, we’ve observed the shift of the interest from broad general-purpose platforms to best-of-breed tools that have deeper functionality in a given area.
  • Addition of observability criteria: These days, observability is certainly stealing the spotlight in the monitoring space. We added observability capabilities and adopted the term as part of the category name “Monitoring and Observability.”
  • AI as cross-functional attribute: AI-powered analytics now touches several aspects of cloud management that we made it a cross-functional attribute (the middle ring of the wheel) in addition to the other four: automation, brokerage, governance and life cycle.

Often, organizations purchase a cloud management tool and implement their management strategy solely based on its available capabilities. With this research, we suggest the opposite approach. Define first what you need to manage and then select the tools that can provide you with the functionality you need.

You can access the full research at “Solution Criteria for Cloud Management Tools” (paywall). Should you want to discuss further, feel free to schedule an inquiry call with me by emailing inquiry@gartner.com or through your Gartner representative.

Follow me on Twitter (@meinardi) or connect with me on LinkedIn for further updates on my research. Looking forward to talking to you!

Why Adopting Kubernetes for Application Portability Is Not a Good Idea

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

I often discuss with clients in infrastructure and operations on whether their organizations should adopt Kubernetes to make their applications portable. If you also have this question, the answer is: no.

Actually, the full story: adopt Kubernetes for the many benefits it provides to application development and architecture and get portability as a side effect. But do not make portability your primary driver for adopting the technology. This thesis is well expanded in the document that Richard Watson, Alan Waite and I have crafted during lockdown this spring: “Assessing Kubernetes for Hybrid and Multicloud Application Portability” (paywall).

Kubernetes or not, application portability always comes at a price that you must be willing to pay – the “portability tax”. Gartner’s advice is to make this decision application by application, based on the likelihood that it will be moved in the future, and how fast that needs to happen. In fact, non-portable applications may still be moved, it will just require more time to execute the transformation.

What is the likelihood that applications change infrastructure provider through their lifespan?

Inquiries show that this likelihood is actually very low. Once deployed in a provider, applications tend to stay there. This is due to data lakes being hard – and expensive – to port and, therefore, end up acting as centers of gravity. The figure below shows the Gartner pyramid of portability, which illustrates basic motivations (at the bottom) and more strategic ones (at the top) for designing portable applications.

For each of your application, ask yourself why portability is important to you. Is it to guarantee survivability? To increase your negotiation leverage with the cloud provider? To mitigate vendor lock-in? The higher you are in the pyramid, the least likely it is that you’ll have those needs.

Kubernetes facilitates portability because it helps standardize our software development life cycle and, most importantly, our operating model. However, it also adds management overhead to our organization, it forces us to engage with commercial vendors and to completely rearchitect our applications. Implementing portability with Kubernetes also requires avoiding any dependency that ties the application to the infrastructure provider, such as the use of cloud provider’s native services. Often, these services provide the capabilities that drove us to the cloud in the first place.

In conclusion, the portability tax is high. Make sure to pay it only for applications that truly need it and that are likely to switch infrastructure provider at some point. For all the others, don’t choose Kubernetes on the basis of a universal portability principle, just because it “sounds right”. On the contrary, adopt Kubernetes for agility, scalability and for modernizing your application architectures.

More on this topic in “Assessing Kubernetes for Hybrid and Multicloud Application Portability” (paywall). Should you want to discuss more, feel free to schedule an inquiry call with myself or Alan Waite by emailing inquiry@gartner.com or through your Gartner representative.

Follow me on Twitter (@meinardi) or connect with me on LinkedIn for further updates on my research. Looking forward to talking to you!

My Research on Cloud Cost Management and Optimization Is Now Available For Free!

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

I am proud to announce that my research on cloud cost management and optimization is now available for free at this link. Gartner made this research public to help organizations in this difficult moment of dealing with a global pandemic and economic recession. The research was selected because it speaks to pandemic-driven business priorities such as cloud adoption and cost optimization.

Gartner has been publishing guidance on managing costs of cloud IaaS and PaaS for the last few years. This practice continues to evolve due to new cloud provider capabilities, organizations increasing their cloud maturity and cloud services becoming more complex. Earlier this year, my colleague Traverse Clayton and I published the latest edition of our cost management framework (depicted in the figure below). This update has drawn a lot of interest from clients, because it helps organizations accelerating cloud adoption in a governed fashion, while unlocking cost savings and minimizing the risk of overspending.

The framework describes the technical capabilities that organizations must develop to manage cloud costs successfully. Our guidance has evolved to encompass new aspects of planning, tracking and optimizing public cloud costs on an ongoing basis. Examples of updates included in this edition are:

  • A clearer delineation between “Reduce” and “Optimize.” Reducing costs is about leveraging more cost-effective configurations without impacting the application architecture. These techniques include rightsizing, scheduling and programmatic discounts. Optimizing costs requires implementing architectural changes that drive costs down. For example, moving from compute instances to event-driven serverless function-as-a-service.
  • The addition of techniques to incentivize financial responsibility. Centralized IT does not want to be held accountable for the spend generated by architectural decisions made by other teams, such as application development and DevOps. Therefore, the framework includes more aspects that help “shift left” the budget accountability. These techniques include budget approvals, dedicated dashboards, cost optimization recommendations and the institution of “leader boards” that highlight the most disciplined cloud consumers.
  • The addition of the correlation of cloud costs with business value. Many digital business applications do not have steady budgets. Their cost often varies on the basis of the number of transactions or users that they handle. The framework helps identify business KPIs and calculate their ratio with cloud costs. Monitoring the trends of that ratio allows organizations to manage costs of applications that have variable demand, in relation to the value that organizations receive from cloud services. Furthermore, such approach allows for the measurement of the efficiency of the cloud cost management practice.

Read the complete cloud cost management and optimization research for free at this link. I hope you find it useful and I welcome your feedback at marco.meinardi@gartner.com. Should you also be a Gartner client wanting to discuss this topic in more details, you can schedule an inquiry call with me by emailing inquiry@gartner.com or through your Gartner representative.

Follow me on Twitter (@meinardi) or connect with me on LinkedIn for further updates on my research. Looking forward to talking to you!

How to Make Your Organization Successful in Public Cloud Tagging

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

If you use public cloud services at some scale, then you know you must tag your resources. You know you must use tagging so that your cost reports get nicely broken down; so that you can create resource groups to enable inventory, governance, automation and access control. You know this but, still, you are not doing it. Or maybe you think you are, but only less than half of your cloud resources are tagged in the way you want.

Unfortunately, this situation is something I hear in my inquiry calls more often than not. Why? Is it because of lack of enforcement measures? Is it because your cloud consumers are not disciplined? Or because tags are perceived just as administrative burden? The answer is all of the above. Tagging is a complex matter and some people assume that distributing a list of “mandatory” tags is enough. But that’s only the very beginning of your tagging strategy.

Common guidance on tagging usually stops at providing a list of suggested tags and describing the technical mechanisms for their implementation. While this is certainly important, such guidance often does not consider the organizational impact of metadata management in highly dynamic environments. Internal resistance within an organization is often the primary cause of the failure of tagging initiatives. That’s why I decided to publish a guidance framework for “Implementing a Tagging Strategy for Cloud IaaS and PaaS” (paywall). The framework is now available to Gartner for Technical Professionals subscribers and it is depicted in the figure below.

Defining your tagging dictionary is really just the beginning of your process, while enforcing tags is the very last step. The activities in between serve to internally promote the value of tagging and to lower the overhead for their implementation. Promoting tags requires the communication of their benefits and use cases. Implementing tags can be made easier through automation.

We developed this framework to make sure you’re successful in your tagging initiative. Cloud providers offer lots of native tools and constructs to manage your tags. However, tagging is not just a technical problem. By following the Gartner framework, you will also manage the organizational impact of tags, mitigate internal resistance and ease their implementation.

The Gartner framework is available today behind paywall with a 30+ page research note that explains its application in details. To know more about this research, you can also schedule an inquiry call with me (inquiry@gartner.com) or talk to your Gartner representative.

Lastly, feel free to follow me on Twitter (@meinardi) or connect with me on LinkedIn for further updates on my research. Looking forward to talking to you!

A Comparison of Public Cloud Cost Optimization Tools is Now Available

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

If you’re using public cloud infrastructure and platform services, I bet that you’ve been thinking about adopting a tool to cut down costs. You’ve been told that there is some inherent waste in your cloud spending and you want to address that. I’m also sure that a number of vendors told you that they can help with that. But to what extent? If cost management and optimization are becoming “table stakes” in the cloud management market, there can be a huge difference in the capabilities of each available solution. Some solutions may just scratch the surface and simply report for underutilized instances – when CPU have been low in usage in the last week or so. But these solutions will leave it up to you to figure out the rest. Other solutions may automatically execute precise instance rightsizing across types, families and regions, using AI-based pattern recognition and ML inference.

Both cloud providers and third-party vendors have invested in developing cost optimization capabilities for public cloud services. In this complex scenario you may wonder: which tools will allow me to truly maximize savings while minimizing performance risks? The good news is that Gartner just published research to answer this exact question and it’s available on gartner.com right now.

My colleague Brian Adler and I have just published the following two research notes, both available behind paywall:

The notes provide a side-by-side comparison of each solution based on a common set of criteria. Examples of criteria include compute instance rightsizing, block storage rightsizing, unused resource decommissioning and reservation portfolio management. For each criterion, vendors have been scored with grades such as “Low”, “Medium” or “High”.

Gartner clients can use the two research notes to understand what you can do using cloud providers’ native tools and which gaps you can fill with third-party tools. Furthermore, clients can use the provided criteria to assess the capabilities of any other public cloud cost optimization tool that hasn’t been included in this research.

This research is part of a series of Solution Comparisons that we published to assess tools in various areas of the Gartner cloud management wheel. Read the full research notes if you want to know the results of this comparative assessment. You can also schedule an inquiry call (inquiry@gartner.com) with myself or my colleague Brian Adler if you want to have private conversations about our research findings. In case you don’t have access to this research and you’d like to, I’m sure your Gartner representative will be more than happy to help.

Lastly, feel free to follow me on Twitter (@meinardi) or connect with me on LinkedIn for further updates on my research. Looking forward to talking to you!

AWS Just Made Their Management Tools Ready for Multicloud

By Marco Meinardi in events

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

I am just back home after spending last week at AWS re:Invent in tiresome, noisy, vibrant and excessive Las Vegas. At Gartner, I cover cloud management and governance and I was disappointed not to hear much about it in any of the keynotes. I get it, management can be sometimes perceived as a boring necessity. However, it is also opportunity to make a cloud platform simpler. And that’s something that AWS needs. Badly.

Despite the absence of highlights in the keynotes, I spotted something interesting while digging through the myriad of November announcements. What apparently got lost in the re:Invent noise is that AWS is opening up some of their key management tools to support resources outside of the AWS cloud. Specifically, AWS CloudFormation and AWS Config now support third-party resources. And that’s a big deal.

The Lost Announcements

The CloudFormation announcement reports that AWS has changed the tool’s architecture to implement resource providers, much in line with what Hashicorp Terraform is also doing. Each resource provider is an independent piece of code that enables support in CloudFormation for a specific resource type and API. A resource provider can be developed independently from CloudFormation itself and by nonAWS developers.

AWS plans to promote resource providers through the open source model and has certainly the ability to grow a healthy community around them. The announcement also says that a number of resource providers will be shortly available for third-party solutions. Upcoming solutions include Atlassian, Datadog, Densify, Dynatrace, Fortinet, New Relic and Spotinst. AWS is implementing this capability also for native AWS resources such as EC2 instances or S3 buckets, hinting that this capability may not be just an exception, but a major architectural change.

In the same way, AWS Config now also supports third-party resources. The same resource providers used by CloudFormation enable AWS Config to manage inventory, but also define rules to check for compliance and create conformation packs (a.k.a. collections of rules). All of this also for nonAWS resources.

Why is This a Big Deal?

With this launch, AWS addresses one of the major shortcomings of its management tools: being limited to a single platform – the AWS cloud. From today, anyone could develop resource providers for Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform resources. This possibility makes AWS CloudFormation and AWS Config de facto ready to become multicloud management tools. And we all know what AWS thinks about multicloud, don’t we?

Furthermore, AWS is now challenging the third-party management market, at least within the provisioning and orchestration, inventory and classification and governance domains (see this Gartner framework for reference). AWS CloudFormation now incorporates more capabilities of HashiCorp Terraform. It also can be used to model and execute complex orchestration workflows that organizations normally handle with platforms like ServiceNow. AWS Config can now aim to become a universal CMDB that can keep track of resource inventory and configuration history from anywhere.

Both AWS CloudFormation and AWS Config are widely-adopted tools. Customers could be incented to extend their use beyond AWS instead of selecting a new third-party tool that would require a new contract to sign and new vendor to manage. Does this mean that AWS has issued a death sentence to the third-party management market that makes much of its ecosystem? Certainly not. But these announcements speak to the greater ambition of AWS and will force third-party vendors to find new ways to continue to add value in the long term. Maybe the resource provider ecosystem will not develop, and customers will continue to prefer independent management vendors. Or maybe not.

In conclusion, it was disappointing not to hear this message loud and clear at re:Invent this year, especially compared to the amount of noise we heard around the launches of Google Anthos and Azure Arc. But there is certainly a trend for which all the major providers are preparing their management tools to stretch out of their respective domains. How far they want to go is yet to be determined.

What Blockchain and Cloud Computing Have in Common

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

Blockchain technologies provide ledger databases whose records are immutable and cryptographically-signed using a distributed consensus or validation protocol. These characteristics contributed to the popularity of blockchain to power transaction execution in multiparty business environments. With blockchain, multiple parties can agree on transaction details while still guaranteeing correctness and prevent tampering, without having to rely on a trusted centralized authority.

To provide such functionality and just like any other database, blockchain technologies are built around platforms, infrastructure, APIs and management tools. Cloud computing is a well-oiled model that provides easy access to all these technology components, in addition to services and capabilities for application development and integration. While cloud computing can certainly help accelerate the execution of blockchain projects, it is also a heavily centralized model, specifically around few hyperscale megavendors. Conversely, the effectiveness of blockchain relies on decentralization as one of its core principles .

Full decentralization is especially important for public blockchains (such as Bitcoin) where anybody is free to participate and transact. Conversely, enterprise blockchains may accept to trade aspects of decentralization (such as a single technology provider) in exchange of easier access to technologies and a lower management overhead.

All hyperscale cloud providers have launched blockchain cloud services in the last 18 months to help organization with their blockchain projects. These services build on the strength of each provider (in terms of infrastructure, platform and application development capabilities) but also aim to facilitate the use of open-source DLT frameworks such as Ethereum, Hyperledger Fabric and Quorum.

On my recently published research “Solution Comparison for Blockchain Cloud Services From Leading Public Cloud Providers” (paywall), I have assessed and compared the blockchain-related cloud services offered by:

  • Alibaba Cloud
  • Amazon Web Services
  • Google
  • IBM
  • Microsoft
  • Oracle

The research provides a heatmap of the capabilities provided by each vendor, allowing Gartner clients to quickly assess their strengths and weaknesses in this space. The research also provides all the details behind the attributed scores for those technical professionals who want to dig deeper into each vendor’s offering. Some example of the comparison criteria include:

  • Number of Supported DLTs
  • Blockchain Community Involvement
  • Infrastructure Supported
  • Fully Managed Ledger Service
  • Smart Contract Management

Like most blockchain technologies, also blockchain cloud services are still immature, especially in light of the rapidly evolving landscape of DLT frameworks. As a demonstration of that, many of the assessed cloud services have been launched during the conduction of this research, which required multiple re-assessements of the vendor offerings. Some vendors also launched additional services and features after the publication of this research, for example:

To know more about this topic or if you would like to discuss further, you can read the research note at “Solution Comparison for Blockchain Cloud Services From Leading Public Cloud Providers” (paywall). You can also reach out to your Gartner representative to schedule an inquiry call with me. Looking forward to hearing your comments!

Is Public Cloud Cheaper Than Running Your Own Data Center?

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

The question on whether public cloud infrastructure is cheaper than running on-premises data centers keeps coming in client inquiries. Clients realize that most of the answers produced by the industry so far are skewed by the vested interests of whoever is coming up with those answer. Public cloud providers make their offerings look significantly more cost-effective than on-premises data centers. Hardware vendors promote the opposite view. Furthermore, within organizations themselves, internal politics continues to inevitably influence the results of any attempt to produce defensible calculations.

That’s why we decided to take a shot at answering this. I’m proud to announce that my research note “How to Develop a Business Case for the Adoption of Public Cloud IaaS” (paywall) is now available on gartner.com. The research provides guidance on how organizations should go about calculating TCOs and ROIs for their cloud adoption and migration projects. Gartner clients often struggle to quantify the cost savings that the cloud model can lead to as well as the potential for new revenue opportunities. As a results, clients often end up calculating cloud costs with the same buying patterns as they were using in their data centers, missing out on the optimization opportunities that public cloud infrastructure can offer. At the same time, clients struggle to quantify the necessary investments to skill up and operationalize cloud to take full advantage of the technology.

The research states that “cloud services can initially be more expensive than running on-premises data centers. [However, it also proves that] cloud services can become cost-effective over time if organizations learn to use and operate them more efficiently.” The statement is backed by an example of workload migration for 2,500 virtual machines from an on-premises data center to Amazon Web Services EC2. The example TCO (shown in the figure below) shows an initial uptake in cloud costs and a steady decline as soon as organizations learn how to apply cost optimization best practices (as described in this other framework). The chart also shows how on-premises costs may have a long tail as organizations take time to actually shut down their data centers.

While the savings on infrastructure costs over time may look appealing, organizations should bear in mind that the overall ROI may be still negative in the short term due to the hefty investments in transformation and the long tail of on-premises data center costs. Furthermore, the example in Figure 1 is based on a number of assumptions (available in the research for consultation) that will not be representative of all situations. As a consequence, organizations that want to conduct a similar exercise should be prepared to tailor the assumptions, being aware of their impact on the final business case result.

To know more about this topic or if you would like to discuss further, you can read the research note at”How to Develop a Business Case for the Adoption of Public Cloud IaaS” (paywall) or reach out to your Gartner representative to schedule an inquiry call with me. Looking forward to hearing your comments!

Neutralizing Shadow IT with Public Cloud Self-Service Governance

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network.

In today’s scenario where IT is at the core of business innovation, I hear organizations struggling with potentially opposing priorities. On one side, business users and developers want more agility and autonomy. On the other side, central IT must continue to achieve governance to minimize risks and improve efficiency at scale. Historically, organizations have prioritized a strictly controlled and centralized model, which was applicable because central IT was solely responsible for IT infrastructure and service delivery. However, since cloud computing, end users found an alternative path to achieving their goals, by going straight to cloud providers and bypassing central IT. Unfortunately, many of those shadow IT projects are not able to scale and expose the organization to uncontrolled risks.

Some organizations decided to address this well-known issue by reinforcing their measures to deny end user access to cloud services. Recently, a client told me how they’re blocking access on their firewall to all amazon.com IP addresses. Other organizations decided to apply their standard governance and operational processes to new cloud environments, often using the cloud just like another data center to simply provide compute, storage and network. Both of these solutions have proven to be unsuccessful as shadow IT continues to proliferate. In fact, none of these solutions enables end users to achieve the goals of becoming more autonomous and agile. Denying access or applying too much intermediation are not effective. Organizations who’ve been successful at neutralizing shadow IT have focused on enabling end users to achieve those goals while preserving the ability to enforce governance principles. To accomplish that, they’ve re-thought their operational and governance models and they became brokers of externally-sourced IT services.

Also cloud IaaS users want more autonomy and agility, they want to procure the infrastructure required to support their projects and they want to leverage the flexibility and scalability of public cloud providers as well as the access to the plethora of value-added services they offer. To support that, it is imperative that organizations develop a cloud IaaS self-service enablement and governance strategy. The figure below depicts the five approaches for self-service enablement that I collated in the recently published research note “5 Approaches for Public Cloud Self-Service Enablement and Governance” (paywall).

Some of the approaches described in the research provide fully automated provisioning workflows, others focus on regulating access and auditing end user activity and workload configurations. The illustrated approaches can provide different degrees of agility, access to innovation, end user autonomy, standardization, policy and control, provisioning automation and complexity. Therefore, it is important for organizations to understand their differences and trade-offs. However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach and technical professionals should master and implement all of them to address the different personas and use cases that live in the organization. The research also contains examples and code snippets on how to implement the described approaches on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

To know more about this topic, you can:

Looking forward to hearing your comments!

Evaluating Cloud Management Platforms and Tools With The Gartner Toolkit

By Marco Meinardi in research

This post originally appears on the Gartner Blog Network.

After several months of work, hundreds of customer calls and tens of vendor briefings, it’s finally out there: the Gartner’s “Evaluation Criteria for Cloud Management Platforms and Tools” has just published and is now available to Gartner clients. The research (which is available behind paywall at this link) contains 215 evaluation criteria divided into eight categories and four additional attributes (see the figure below). Gartner clients can use this research to assess cloud management vendor solutions and determine which areas of management they cover. Furthermore, clients will be able to compare the results of the assessments to select the cloud management platforms (CMPs) and tools that best align to their requirements.

The eight categories above serve as the primary scope for each criterion. The four attributes serve as additional scope and they apply to criteria across all eight categories. For example, the “provisioning policies” criterion belongs to the “Provisioning and Orchestration” category, but it’s also tagged with the “Governance” and “Life Cycle” attributes. This bidimensional classification is the result of the type of questions we receive from clients and that we want to answer with this research. For instance, clients often ask “what are the functions required to manage cloud costs?”, but also “how do I evaluate cloud governance tools?”. The approach we’ve taken will give clients the ability to quickly identify criteria from multiple overlapping perspectives.

Furthermore, all categories present a breakdown into “Required”, “Preferred” and “Optional”. This further classification is based on what Gartner thinks should be required for an enterprise-grade solution. However, clients are encouraged to tailor the evaluation criteria research with what they consider important for their organization. To do this, the research comes with an attached editable spreadsheet that clients can manipulate to prepare a tailored version of the evaluation criteria to support their RFI/RFP efforts.

Because CMPs on the market tend to provide a set of functions that differ based on the chosen cloud platform, clients should use this research to run a separate assessment for each of the cloud platforms they intend to use. For example, a CMP may support Amazon CloudWatch but not Azure Monitor as data source. Therefore, the CMP should be scored as “Yes” for AWS and “No” for Microsoft Azure with respect to the “Cloud-platform-native monitoring integration” criterion.

The wheel in the above figure has evolved a bit since the version of my previous post. However, that has been a necessary step to take as we dove into the actual requirements beneath each category. We are happy with the results of this research and we’re confident that Gartner clients will be as well. We encourage all clients to use the Evaluation Criteria for Cloud Management Platforms and Tools and share their feedback for future improvement or refinement.

To engage with me, feel free to schedule inquiry call (inquiry@gartner.com), follow me on Twitter (@meinardi) or connect with me on LinkedIn. Looking forward to talking to you!