Thomas Bitman of Gartner wrote a blog
post last year about why OpenStack projects fail. In that article, he
outlined three particular metrics which together cause 60% of OpenStack
projects to fall short of expectations:
- Wrong people (31% of failures): a successful cloud needs commitment both from the operations team as well as from “anchor” tenants.
- Wrong processes (19% of failures): a successful cloud automates across silos in the software development lifecycle, not just within silos.
- Wrong metrics (10% of failures): a successful cloud focuses on top line transformation by accelerating delivery of innovative applications and services, not merely on squeezing bottom line costs.
Wrong people
"Agile clouds need agile processes — and people are
your biggest supporters,
or your biggest roadblocks.” - Thomas Bitman
Many OpenStack projects start as technology pilots with part
time technical staff. If there is not a single champion responsible for the
success of an OpenStack cloud initiative as their full-time job, the chance of
failure is high. There are two critical roles that govern cloud success:
• Cloud operations champion: this champion
is not just responsible for building and operating the cloud (supplying cloud
capacity), they are equally responsible for on-boarding developers and
workloads onto the cloud (building cloud demand). Their job is to work closely
with developer tenants to make sure that the developer on boarding process is
smooth and that key developer tools are available in the cloud application
catalog.
• Cloud anchor tenant: developers are
overwhelmingly the most important early adopters of private cloud. Accelerating
the software development lifecycle through DevOps automation is by far the
highest value of private cloud. Therefore the most important validation for a
private cloud is to on-board a key set of developers and show the impact of
accelerating the development and go live process for their
applications. Having an anchor tenant committed to using the cloud is a
key prerequisite for achieving success.
Wrong processes
"Is this really cloud? Or just virtualization? And what
about
the stuff running inside the VMs?” - Thomas Bitman
Many OpenStack projects start with very limited goals around
provisioning generic VMs or delivering relatively limited development services.
This effectively automates just a silo within the software development
lifecycle. Business value comes from being able to automate not just within but
also across the silos of the software development lifecycle.
• Beware of automating silos: for many IT
organizations, the tragedy of virtualization has been that developers can
provision a VM within 20 minutes, but getting a fully configured development
environment takes over 6 weeks.
• Aim to automate entire Go Live process:
The ultimate goal of a private cloud should be to accelerate the delivery of
applications and features by automating the entire process from code check in
to go live. This level of automation is also the only way a traditional
enterprise can compete with “born in the cloud” SaaS businesses.
Wrong metrics
“Not putting the right metrics in place - usually, this is
focusing
on cost-savings, not agility." - Thomas Bitman
Private cloud has often been sold as a natural extension of
virtualization - as such, customers often justified their OpenStack investments
based on IT cost savings. While cost savings are one value of a successful
cloud, enabling business agility is the core value delivered by OpenStack.
OpenStack projects should measure business value not just
for the cloud overall but for each tenant. In particular, they should focus on
two tenant metrics:
•
Uptime dashboard: public clouds have long
delivered detailed uptime metrics. Private clouds must do the same if they are
to build trust with tenants and create a business case to justify additional
cloud investments.
•
Value dashboard: private cloud value is
primarily driven by its ability to accelerate the software development
lifecycle. McKinsey has documented that DevOps
automation can accelerate the go live process by 80%, which in turn can
deliver top line revenue growth, for example by enabling greater innovation in
customer facing apps. Tracking continuous integration deployments is a proxy
for the overall acceleration enabled by private cloud.
Planning for OpenStack Success
The antidote for OpenStack project failure is to build a
business case for private cloud that addresses people, process and metric
issues. This business case should lay out a phased approach for rolling out
their private cloud.
The starting point is identifying a full time cloud champion
and teaming them with an anchor tenant who will use the cloud and provide input
on how to deliver value by accelerating delivery of new applications and
features. The next step is to define a phased set of investments, each with
clear success metrics that govern timing for subsequent investment:
• Phase 1: stand up cloud and on-board
anchor tenant. Success metric: 99% uptime, 1.5X software development
acceleration. Once these metrics are achieved, the company should invest in
phase 2 of their rollout.
• Phase 2: on-board additional tenants.
Success metric: 99.9% uptime, 2.0X software development acceleration.
• Phase 3: automate go live process from
code checkin to production. Success metric: 99.99% uptime, 4.0X software
development acceleration.
An ideal approach for a company looking to make a strategic
investment in private cloud is to conduct a short pilot in an OpenStack lab
that allows them to validate the business case. This kind of a pilot can also
allow the cloud champion and “anchor” tenant to work together on clarifying
requirements for successfully on-boarding an initial application to the private
cloud.
