1. Investigate the market and select a reseller.

We recently did a reseller-focused webcast with the folks at Talkin’ Cloud and a spot survey showed that over 75% of attendees were actively looking for a cloud partner. Clearly, a large number of telcos, SIs, and regional service providers are scouring the market and aggressively assessing whom to partner with.

If you are looking for a partner, what should you be asking each vendor? How can you ensure you are partnering with an innovative, differentiated provider that can bring you new revenue over the long-haul? Here’s a great starting point:

Does the provider have a global set of data centers?

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT: Your customers are more global than ever, and physical locations close to users and customers matter. Also, data sovereignty regulations impact where the physical “host” servers need to be.

Can the provider support the complex infrastructure and networking needs of your managed customers?

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT: If not, there’s a good chance your customers won’t find your new cloud services attractive for their enterprise workloads.

How often to legacy systems need to be re-architected to fit the provider’s cloud?

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT: Agility and immediate access to resources are key drivers to move to the cloud in the first place. But this doesn’t need to be at odds with legacy applications - even complex environments can be migrated cleanly to the cloud if you choose the right provider.

What controls do you have in place to protect data sovereignty?

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT: Larger businesses need peace of mind to know their data is securely stored in isolation, in a physical location they can specify.

Which 3rd party products are commonly added by the provider’s customers, if any?

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT: Add-on services can be helpful for specific scenarios, but when it comes to the core scenarios of cloud management and automation, you should look for a provider that has significant capabilities built-in. Bringing in extra modules just adds cost and complexity for you and your customers.

How does the partner manage customer accounts and billing processes?

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT: These back-office functions are vital when it comes to quickly monetizing the service. Sure, it’s not a sexy set of features, but it will make invoicing a breeze.

Can I rebrand the provider’s offering and make it look and feel like something from us? Does this feature cost extra?

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT: This is key to customer loyalty and building brand equity.

How do I make money with your cloud?

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT: Powerful features and a highly capable global cloud platform don’t mean anything without a competitive partner program, and a spirit of partnership with your selected vendor.

How can I extend my business model of value-added services to the provider’s cloud?

WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT: This last question is key. How can you make sure that customers don’t just use a commodity cloud offering, eliminating your unique expertise? Among other things, Tier 3 encourages customers to differentiate on price and by offering exclusive intellectual property through Blueprints that encapsulate best practices on building highly-available, tuned application environments.

2. Evaluate Tier 3 - sign up for an account.

This one’s easy! Just visit the self-service sign up page and register for a new Tier 3 account.  Within moments, you will receive an email with temporary credentials and a link to the easy-to-use Tier 3 Control Portal.

3. Change the site aesthetics to fit your brand.

Once you’ve logged in, the first thing to do is customize the Control Portal UI to match your brand. Tier 3 offers a variety of settings that allow you to rename the interface, modify logos and shortcut icons, and alter the color scheme of the site. These superficial – but important – changes go a long way to maintaining a brand identity with your customers.

4. Update the support-related hyperlinks.

Your will likely want your customers to take advantage of the support experience that you currently offer. Fortunately, you can easily override existing support links and point to your own online assets. For instance, you can change the default support email address, phone number, knowledge base URL, chat service URL, and much more.

5. Update outbound email templates.

Each email that comes from the cloud platform should reflect your brand and message. To achieve this, Tier 3 added configurable settings that let you change the email addresses, signature, subject lines, and message body of the most common system alerts.

6. Integrate with your existing billing, configuration management, and identity systems.

Unless you want to build a silo cloud service that doesn’t integrate with the rest of your back office systems, you’ll want to pay careful attention to this  step! To integrate your billing systems with Tier 3, consider using our helpful Billing API that gives you access to usage estimates and monthly invoices. While you can easily access and download invoices from the Tier 3 Control Portal, the Billing API gives you a way to directly integrate our cloud with your financial systems.

Many organizations have investments in change management or support systems that track assets throughout their lifecycle. How can you ensure that servers in the Tier 3 cloud are properly “tagged” and linked to a configuration management database? One useful option is to add account-level “custom fields” that are populated whenever servers are added to the Tier 3 cloud.

You can access these custom field values through the Tier 3 API as well. If you chose to provision servers from within your own custom portal, you could call the Create Server API and tag the server with an identifier from your own system. This makes it simple to reconcile changes to servers in the Tier 3 cloud with the entries in your local systems.

Finally, if you offer a centralized identity directory to authenticate users of your existing platform, you may want to reuse that with the Tier 3 cloud. Tier 3 supports the SAML identity protocol for single sign-on between external identity directories and the Tier 3 Control Portal. Consider SAML and SSO if you want to make it simple for customers to reuse their existing credentials to log into the Tier 3 Control Portal.

7. Choose your preferred data centers.

You’re nearly ready to open the doors of your new cloud offering! In this step, assess which data centers you want customers to deploy servers into. The “Preferred Data Centers” settings let you choose which data centers show up for users who provision and manage servers.

8. Establish cloud costs and promotions.

While you likely established contractual settings early on, this final step involves configuring pricing details in the platform. We offer a very competitive pricing plan that ensures that you can generate a strong recurring revenue stream while giving customers a cost-effective cloud solution. Contract terms and promotion codes are managed by Tier 3 but we work closely with you to rapidly apply pricing parameters to your account.

Summary

The cloud offers a compelling and lucrative opportunity for existing managed service providers and systems integrators. Instead of building and maintaining your own cloud, consider partnering with Tier 3 and bringing cloud services online in a matter of days or weeks!

To start with, when users of Codenvy start a new web application project, they are asked which technology they want to use, and then which PaaS to deploy to. At this moment, the Tier 3 Web Fabric is available for Java Web Application (WAR), Java Spring, and Ruby on Rails projects. Note that Web Fabric works with more environments than these three, but these are the technologies supported via Codenvy.

Once the user chooses the technology and corresponding PaaS, they choose a simple project template (if one exists for that technology), and are then asked for the management API endpoint of the Web Fabric environment.

The project framework is then created, and the user is prompted for their Web Fabric credentials. After providing a valid username and password, the application is deployed and Internet-accessible. All of this in matter of seconds! To update the application, developers visit the PaaS menu option and choose Tier 3 Web Fabric.

From the subsequent window, developers can modify the name, URL, and memory allocation of the application. Additionally, the application can be started, stopped, deleted, and updated. It’s also possible to add Web Fabric application services – such as RabbitMQ for messaging or Microsoft SQL Server for relational database storage – to a project.

Codenvy can also be used as a simple management interface for any applications running in Web Fabric. This can come in handy if you’re on a shared machine without the typical Cloud Foundry management tools available!

This interface shows you each application running in your Web Fabric environment, and lets you start, stop, restart, or delete it.

Summary

We’re excited to be a supported part of the innovative Codenvy platform and think that this lowers the barrier to entry for our customers while making it simpler for developers to build amazing applications in any language of their choice. Want to try it out? Sign up for a free Codenvy account and then take Web Fabric for a spin!

One thing they’ve told us in recent months is that they want to be able to quickly find all of the diverse resources they’ve created in the Tier 3 cloud. We heard that request loud and clear and just released Global Search which is a unique capability that dramatically improves your user experience.

What is Global Search? It’s a platform-wide utility that lets you search for accounts, users, servers, Groups, networks, cloud orchestration Blueprints, Blueprint packages, and IP addresses – all from a single search box that is always displayed at the top of each page in our Control Portal.

The IT Professional Scenario

This powerful feature works with partial matches, which means that you can type a word like “Exchange” and get back any Tier 3 resource in your account hierarchy that is related to a Microsoft Exchange mail server. Below, see that this particular search returned some servers that are running Exchange Server, groups residing in different data centers, an account with the word “Exchange” in the description field, and a Blueprint.

Our design team studied the best search experiences in consumer and business products – Spotlight from Apple, as well as the search experience in GitHub for example – for ideas on how to refine results quickly for users.

The Support Scenario

Global Search works great for scenarios when you recall a partial name of a resource but don’t know which data center it resides in, or which sub-account it is associated with. Or, consider the case for the Tier 3 Network Operations Center (NOC) where a support request comes in, and all the caller has is the IP address of the troublesome server. Instead of navigating through collections of servers in the hopes of stumbling upon the right one, the support agent can now just type in all or part of the IP address into Global Search. What happens when you select one of the search results? The Global Search not only takes you to the selected resource, but also switches your account context and data center (if those values are different than your current context). All with a single click!

The Reseller Scenario

Another key use case revolves around resellers who deliver our cloud services to their customers. Those resellers have to manage numerous accounts and users and wanted a fast way to locate records. Tier 3 Global Search can find resources that span data centers and sub-accounts which is ideal for those who have resources spread out globally. Even if the only data you have is a last name or email address, you can still quickly find accounts or users that match that value.

Summary

Global Search will introduce massive efficiencies for daily users of the Tier 3 cloud. Whether you are support staff, , a system administrator, or a developer, this feature ensures that you can put your servers and users in any of our global data centers without worrying about how to find them later. Want to try out Global Search? Sign up for a free trial and see what an enterprise cloud SHOULD be.

Benefits of PaaS

What exactly is PaaS? Basically, it’s a way of delivering an application platform as a service. Developers don’t interface directly with infrastructure (e.g. servers, networks, load balancers) but rather, focus on building and deployment applications through a set of exposed services in a managed fabric. PaaS simplifies the deployment and management of modern web applications while making those applications more resilient and functional. How can PaaS add value to your organization? Let’s drill into some specifics:

 
• Reduce server sprawl with a centralized host for web applications. How many web servers are sitting relatively idle in your data center because they are only running a handful of applications? Server sprawl can be a major issue as each IT project requisitions its own hardware for application development/staging/QA/production. What about all your websites for customers and marketing campaigns? It’s possible that you’re using many different servers (and even providers!) to host all of those individual websites. PaaS can offer a centralized fabric that can be sized and optimized for hundreds of internal or external web applications.
 
• Save money by adding resources only when you need them. Many PaaS products have a concept of automatic scale or user-driven resizing to account for spikes or dips in utilization. Before cloud computing, organizations typically sized their infrastructure for peaks and accepted that their environment would be underutilized the majority of the time. Now, it’s possible to deploy a web application with a 128MB memory allocation, and instantly double it when needed. Need to spread the workload across multiple machines? Simply issue a command to add the application to another node in the PaaS fabric. No calls to the operations team, no formal “deployment” exercises. PaaS makes it possible to size and scale applications on demand, which makes it easier for you to manage the overall environment.
 
• Focus on your application, and don’t sweat the infrastructure. One of the most important benefits of PaaS is that it abstracts the infrastructure away from the application, and the developer. Developers deploy to a fabric, not a server. There’s no need for the IT project team to provision web or database servers. Simply push applications to the existing PaaS environment. The infrastructure itself is managed closely by an operations team and automation is included at all levels to deliver automatic patching, scaling, monitoring and more.
 
• Multi-tenancy and high-availability baked in. PaaS products are designed to deliver high-availability to multiple applications (or “tenants”) and are therefore scaled out to provide significant compute capacity. As such, you’ll find many PaaS products with built-in load balancing services, failover when servers fail, concurrency management,  and more. All of these features boost reliability and performance for each application hosted in the PaaS. Even applications not specifically designed for PaaS can conceivably be deployed to a PaaS with little to no code refactoring.
 
• Avoid unnecessary duplication by using consolidated application services. When most people think of PaaS they think of hosting web applications, but some of the best capabilities are those offered by complimentary services.  Most PaaS products offer add-on services like databases, storage, identity management, messaging, caching and more. You’ll also find some PaaS products that offer business services such as service catalogs, and API management and monitoring. Developers can use these services when building their web applications and not have to provision or locate hardware to host those services at runtime. These services simply exist inside the PaaS and are available to all applications deployed there.
 
• Deliver “IT as a Service” through measured usage for easy chargebacks. A core tenet of cloud computing is “pay as you go” and measured usage. A true PaaS is built upon a “cloudy” foundation that tracks utilization and delivers an all-up cost to the user at the end of the month (or whenever the user checks their charges). Because of this cost transparency, it’s easy for organizations to deliver “IT as a service” by offering a PaaS for internal/external websites and passing along the usage-based invoices to each department.

All of this helps developers produce faster deployments while giving system administrators a more streamlined operations responsibility.

Why Tier 3 Web Fabric?

Tier 3 has its own PaaS product – called Web Fabric – that is based on Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry project. We’ve added the open-source Iron Foundry extensions so that we can offer some of the best language and framework support in the industry. Unlike the shared PaaS services offered by others, Web Fabric is provisioned uniquely for each customer. This gives you the isolation you need, while still offering a robust platform for all the custom applications used by your organization. The default Web Fabric environment consists of five total servers and can support dozens of web applications.

Why might you choose to use the Tier 3 Web Fabric to host your modern web applications? We like to point out at least five reasons:

 
1. Support for the programming languages you already use. Most IT shops are heterogeneous and use technologies from multiple vendors. You may have written a number of enterprise-class web applications in .NET or Java, but also have departments that make use of Ruby or PHP. If you’re doing more mobile development, you might have started looking at Node.js for high performing web applications. Tier 3’s Web Fabric supports all those programming languages and more. Instead of using multiple PaaS products or infrastructure clouds to host your diverse application portfolio, use a single fabric for all of them!
 
2. Application services to cover your scenarios. Need a relational database? We offer MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server. Looking for a NoSQL repository? Web Fabric has Redis and MongoDB. RabbitMQ is also available when you want to add a durable message queue to your solution. In addition, each Web Fabric comes with New Relic monitoring for web applications. This excellent application performance management tool gives you deep insight that helps identify bottlenecks and monitor application health.
 
3. Cloud Foundry ecosystem. There’s no doubting the impact of Cloud Foundry on the PaaS industry. This open source project was launched in 2010 and has been adopted by multiple PaaS vendors. Not only does this make it straightforward to move applications between Cloud Foundry-compliant clouds, but also means that there are multiple parties creating tools that work for any Cloud Foundry environment. From the Windows-based Cloud Foundry Explorer, to the OSX-friendly Project Thor, to web-based development environments, there’s a growing ecosystem of vendors and tools to help you be successful with Cloud Foundry.
 
4. Enterprise-class infrastructure. Tier 3’s network of highly resilient, globally distributed infrastructure is optimized for performance throughout the stack. And since Web Fabric runs on the Tier 3 enterprise cloud, your applications will be powered by high performing storage, multiple VPN options, security services, and much more.
 
5. IaaS and PaaS, better together. Not all workloads fit into a PaaS platform, and not all applications require dedicated infrastructure. By offering our customers enterprise-class infrastructure in addition to Web Fabric, we’ve provided two useful hosting mechanisms in the same cloud. Keep your PaaS applications geographically close to your IaaS applications and data, and share the same management tools, security profile, and networking configuration.

Deploying to Web Fabric from a Cloud-based Development Environment

Developers can push their application to Web Fabric in a number of ways. While most developers are familiar with command line interfaces and GUI tools that run on their desktop, a new crop of cloud-based integrated development environments (IDEs) can make PaaS deployments even simpler. Cloud IDEs offer excellent collaboration capabilities, easy accessibility, and “no-touch” setup.

One such cloud IDE is Codenvy. This tool works natively with Cloud Foundry, making it easy to build Java/Ruby/Python/PHP applications and then push them to Web Fabric. After signing up for a free account, the developer is presented with the option to link to GitHub or any Git repository.

Codenvy uses a handy “new project” wizard experience to help the developer choose which programming language to use, and then which (supported) PaaS to push to. In the short animation below, observe how I created a new Java Spring project, chose Cloud Foundry (Web Fabric) as a destination, finish the wizard and publish the application to Web Fabric.

The Codenvy IDE includes many developer productivity features including type-ahead coding (i.e. “intellisense”), code generation, formatting tools, and much more. Changing the application code and re-publishing the application to Web Fabric is simple. Notice how easy it is to resize my application (e.g. memory, instance count) at any time!

Besides simply deploying applications, Codenvy supports simple management of existing applications. From the PaaS –> Cloud Foundry –> Applications menu, I can see all the applications that I’ve deployed to Web Fabric and stop/start/restart/delete any of them.

Developers using cloud-based IDEs don’t get all the features of desktop IDEs (like access to local resources, plug-ins), but they are an increasingly viable choice for developers who are trying new technologies or need access to their IDE from any computer.

Summary

With our enterprise-class infrastructure and platform cloud, Tier 3 is uniquely positioned to address your cloud needs. Web Fabric is an ideal host for your modern web applications and its Cloud Foundry heritage makes it compatible with a wide array of tools including cloud-based IDEs like Codenvy.

Interested in taking a look at Web Fabric? Contact us for a demonstration and free trial!

The Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey Summary from Everest Group.  Done in conjunction with the organizers of Cloud Connect, the survey of 3 segments (cloud buyers, cloud service providers, and cloud advisors) offers a reality check on where the market is today, compared to the future-looking perspectives that are common in emerging spaces like this one.  One of the more interesting highlights that mirrors our experience:

Public cloud providers may need to modify their communication on the cost benefits of adoption from a pure cost/unit conversation to one that is more focused around lower TCO and ROI

The findings also paint a positive picture for platform-as-a-service (PaaS), indicating that a strong majority of survey respondents are already using PaaS, or plan to in the near future.  Check out the whole survey here.

Q&A with Joe Weinman of Telx.  Against conventional wisdom, Joe has long predicted that hybrid clouds will be the eventual end state of cloud computing.  Our own Richard Seroter catches up with Joe, and discusses the finer points of hybrid cloud and something called the Backseat Airline Magazine Bias.

PEER 1 Launches the Mission Critical Cloud, powered by Tier 3. I didn’t see too many product launches at Cloud Connect, so this one (albeit self-servingly) makes the list.  There are many white-label products of this sort in the market today, but very few that are targeted upstream at businesses with more complex requirements.  This partnership helps Tier 3 scale, while complementing PEER 1’s product portfolio.  The product announcement is here.

6fusion, utility-metering of cloud services for the enterprise.  ROI and TCO calculations for enterprises considering the public cloud can be complicated, even for small workloads.  This complexity grows as hybrid cloud and additional vendors are thrown into the mix.  Solving this problem of cost transparency, and ultimately delivering “apples to apples” comparisons across multiple cloud, based on historical and real-time data, is the aim of 6fusion.

I saw a demo of their app, and it is very cool.  There are commodities trading overtones to their approach and the UI.  In fact, CEO John Cowan wrote a few weeks back:

“When the modern enterprise or resource supplier can apply the principles of financial trading to the IT industry we are going to see a force capable of completely redefining everything we currently think we know about the business of technology delivery.”

There will be a range of cloud services: vanilla commodity services for low-end deployments, other more differentiated offerings for mission-critical scenarios, and other tiers in between.  6fusion aims to help IT quantify the value difference between the inevitable layers of cloud services.  It will be interesting to watch their progress, and see how the industry in general grapples with delivering better cost transparency as complexity of cloud deployments grows.

Cloudmunch. This startup launched its DevOps platform, a “first-of-its-kind full-stack continuous delivery platform”, at DeployCon.  With this service, developers can leverage full-stack continuous delivery for applications and infrastructure, with integrations to GitHub and support for Chef.  It is a little surprising that this hasn’t been thought of before—there is a lot of flexibility and efficiency for all the devs out there.  Read the news of their launch here.

Flexiant receives funding for cloud orchestration.  This wasn’t anything specific to Cloud Connect, but the timing was apt.  Cloud orchestration remains a little mysterious to most enterprises (as well as the reseller channel), so traction in the category is encouraging (Tier 3 for our part, has built Blueprints).  Flexiant seems keen to use orchestration on a larger scale, actually helping with greenfield reseller cloud build outs, instead of targeted templates to assist end-user IT pros.  Sounds like a US expansion is in the works.  They will be one to watch in the States.

Load Balancing

What is it?

Wikipedia describes load balancing as:

Load balancing is a computer networking method to distribute workload across multiple computers or a computer cluster, network links, central processing units, disk drives, or other resources, to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload. Using multiple components with load balancing, instead of a single component, may increase reliability through redundancy.

You commonly see this technique employed in web applications where multiple web servers work together to handle inbound traffic. There are at least two reasons why load balancing is employed:

• The required capacity is too large for a single machine. When running processes that consume a large amount of system resources (e.g. CPU and memory), it often makes sense to employ multiple servers to distribute the work instead of constantly adding capacity to a single server. In plenty of cases, it’s not even possible to allocate enough memory or CPU to a single machine to handle all of the work! Load balancing across multiple servers makes it possible to host high traffic websites or run complex data processing jobs that demand more resources than a single server can deliver.
• Looking for more reliability and flexibility in a solution deployment. Even if you *could* run an entire server application on a single server, it may not be a good idea. Load balancing can increase reliability by providing many servers able to do the same job. If one server becomes unavailable, the others can simply pick up the additional work until a new server comes online. Software updates become easier since a server can simply be taken out of the load balancing pool when a patch or reboot is necessary. Load balancing gives system administrators more flexibility in maintaining servers without negatively impacting the application as a whole.

Load balancing can be accomplished using either a “push” or a “pull” model. For web applications or database clusters that sit behind a load balancer, inbound requests are pushed to the pool of servers based on an algorithm such as round-robin. In this scenario, servers await traffic sent to them by the load balancer. It’s also possible to use a “pull” model where work requests are added to a centralized “queue” and a collection of servers retrieve those requests from that queue when they are available. For instance, consider big data processing scenarios where many servers work to analyze data and return results. Each server takes a chunk of work and the overall processing load is distributed across many machines.

How can Tier 3 help?

Tier 3 offers multiple load balancing options to our customers. All customers have access to a free, shared load balancer. This load balancer service – based on the powerful Citrix Netscaler product – provides a range of capabilities including SSL offloading for higher performance, session persistence (known as “sticky sessions”), and routing of TCP, HTTP and HTTPS traffic for up to three servers. To use this service today, send a request to noc@tier3.com.  We plan to launch a self-service version of this capability in the very near future.

If you’re looking for more control over the load balancing configuration or have higher bandwidth needs, you can deploy a dedicated load balancer (virtual appliance) into the Tier 3 cloud.  This “bring your own load balancer” option leverage internal expertise you may have with a particular vendor. It also gives you complete control over the load balancer setup so that you can modify the routing algorithm or enable/disable features that matter to your business.

High Availability

What is it?

Returning to Wikipedia, high availability is defined as:

High availability is a system design approach and associated service implementation that ensures a prearranged level of operational performance will be met during a contractual measurement period.

High availability is described through service level agreements and achieved through an architecture that focuses on constant availability even in the face of failures at any level of the system. While load balancing introduces redundancy, it’s not a strategy that alone can provide high availability. Servers sitting behind a load balancer may be running, but that doesn’t mean that they are available!

Availability addresses the ability to withstand failure from all angles including the network, storage, and even the data center itself. Enterprise cloud services like those from Tier 3 are built on a highly available architecture that uses redundancy at all levels to ensure that no single component failure in a data center impacts overall system availability. This includes “passive” redundancy built into data centers to overcome power or internet provider failures, as well as “active” redundancy that leverages sophisticated monitoring to detect issues and initiate failover procedures.

All of our customers get platform-level high availability when they use the Tier 3 cloud “out of the box.” That means that you can rely on us for your workloads knowing that our architecture is well-designed and highly redundant. However – back to the introductory paragraph – it’s the customer’s responsibility to design a highly-available application architecture. Simply deploying an application to our cloud doesn’t make it highly available. For example, if you deploy a single Microsoft SQL Server instance in the Tier 3 cloud, you do not have a highly available database. If that database server goes offline or network access is interrupted, your application’s availability will be impacted. To design a highly available Microsoft SQL Server solution, you have multiple options. One choice is to create a cluster of database servers (where all nodes are active at the same time, or, nodes sit passively by waiting to be engaged) that access data from a shared disk. When a failure in the active node is detected, the alternate node is automatically called into action.

How can Tier 3 help?

Designing highly available systems is complex. Unfortunately, no cloud provider can offer a checkbox labeled “Make this application highly available!” in their cloud management portal. Crafting a highly available system involves a methodical approach that navigates through every single layer of the system and identifies single points of failure that should be made redundant. For components that cannot be made redundant, it’s important to make sure that the application can continue to run even if that component becomes unavailable.

The Tier 3 professional services team consists of skilled, experienced architects who have designed and built cloud-scale solutions for customers. They can sit with your team and make sure that you’ve taken advantage of every relevant feature that Tier 3 has to offer, while helping  you make sure that your system landscape is constructed in a way that will ensure continual availability.

Don’t forget to regularly test your high availability design in order to uncover weak points or ensure that configurations remain valid.

Disaster Recovery

What is it?

Once more we turn to Wikipedia which defines disaster recovery as:

Disaster recovery (DR) is the process, policies and procedures that are related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure which are vital to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster. Disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity. While business continuity involves planning for keeping all aspects of a business functioning in the midst of disruptive events, disaster recovery focuses on the IT or technology systems that support business functions.

DR is all about how you handle unexpected events. Typically, your cloud provider has to declare a disaster before explicitly initiating DR procedures. A brief network outage or storage failure in a data center is usually not enough to trigger a disaster response. There are two phrases that you often hear when defining a DR plan. A recovery point objective (RPO) describes the maximum window of data that can be lost because of a disaster. For example, an RPO of 12 hours means that it is possible that when you get back online after a disaster, you may have lost the most recent 12 hours of data collected by your systems. A recovery time objective (RTO) identifies how long the IT systems (and processes) can be offline before being restored. For example, an RTO of 48 hours means that it may take two days before the systems lost in the disaster are brought back online and becoming usable again.

How can Tier 3 help?

Tier 3 customers have disaster protection natively in the platform. We offer two classes of storage: standard and premium. The major difference is that standard storage get five days of rolling backups within a given data center, while premium storage users get fourteen days of rolling backups including replication to an in-country data center. Tier 3 is powered by global data centers in multiple countries and we use storage replication to enable you to get back online within 8 hours (RTO) and with a maximum RPO of 24 hours.

While this provides assurances against losing all of your data in the event of a disaster, it still may not provide the level of business continuity that you need. If your business cannot tolerate more than a few moments of downtime, even in the event of a disaster, then it’s critical to architect a solution that can withstand the loss of an entire data center. Returning to our earlier Microsoft SQL Server example, consider the ways to construct a highly available database that remains online with minimal data loss, even during a disaster. SQL Server offers replication technologies like database mirroring and AlwaysOn that make it possible to do near-real time replication across geographies.

The experts in the Tier 3 services team can help you identify all the DNS, networking, compute and storage considerations for building systems that are not only highly available within a data center, but across data centers.

Summary

It’s often the case that load balancing, high availability and disaster recovery lapses don’t surface until it’s too late. While Tier 3 does everything we can to architect our platform for maximum availability and resiliency, our customers still retain responsibility for deploying their systems in a manner that meets their performance and business continuity needs. We are eager to talk to you about how to validate your existing cloud applications or design new solutions that can function at cloud scale. Contact our services team today!

Why?

We see at least two challenges with templates.

1. Impossible for providers to match complete need, and difficult for customers to maintain custom templates. The number of templates offered by leading cloud providers range from dozens to thousands. With templates, the provider aims to offer as many useful combinations of OS + software as possible. However, this requires providers to engage in an endless quest to assemble server images that are useful to customers.

   What if the customer doesn’t see anything they like? Sure, you can upload custom templates, but that shifts the maintenance responsibility to the customer. The provider may have automation tools available for updating and patching images, but enterprise IT departments may not have the necessary capabilities to do the care and feeding of a custom template library.

2. Not a complete replacement for the way enterprise IT builds servers today. IT organizations don’t typically rely on a library of server templates when they build new machines. Instead, they follow a more assembly-line approach to stand up a server for a particular system. This includes selecting the operating system, joining a server to a domain, adding storage, and installing the relevant software. Advanced organizations have software catalogs that help with automated installation, but many companies still rely on physical media or installation files residing on shared network drives. So what’s the problem? We find that a template-driven model can give a misleading sense of deployment speed as the server is *available* quickly, but still requires a significant number of follow on tasks until the server is actually enterprise-ready.

So what is Tier 3’s model?

The Better Way

Instead of relying on templates, Tier 3 offers a reliable orchestration engine (called Blueprints) that lets you choose what software and script commands to run when creating a new server.

There are three things that our customers like about this.

1. Match unique needs through just-in-time software combinations. It’s impossible to pre-build server templates that match the individual needs of each customer. While a good template can serve as a foundation for subsequent manual activities, we went a step further. We offer a diverse set of base operating system templates, and offer a catalog of enterprise software products that can be layered on after the server is built.

   

2. The logical – and automated – extension to how IT builds servers today.Building a server isn’t just about installing an operating system and some software. System administrators go through a series of activities to provision storage, join network domains, acquire IP addresses, disable unnecessary services, and much more. Besides just offering a software catalog, we also provide a series of tasks and scripts that you can run against a new server. Tasks include activities such as adding a (public) IP address or taking a snapshot of the new server.

   

   Scripts are commonly used to configure the server (and its corresponding software). Tier 3’s build process lets you run a variety of scripts to get your server into a finished state.

   

3. Extensible to meet enterprise standards. We won’t claim to have all the software and scripts that you need to meet your enterprise security and software standards. That’s why we fully encourage you to upload your own software and scripts into a private library just for your organization. Anything in your library can be applied to your new or existing servers.

   

   Do you have a unique script command to run just for a single server build process? The Tier 3 Blueprints engine supports custom PowerShell, Command, and SSH script statements that get executed after the server is built.

   

Customers are free to create and maintain server templates in the Tier 3 environment, and some do. But we’re seeing more and more customers opt for the orchestration engine approach. This way, customers can build servers exactly how they want them, every time! Check out our tier3.com Servers and Blueprints pages to learn more about how we help you automate the server build process.

Application Integration

Each application – whether packaged or custom built – serves a unique functional purpose. Frequently, information from another applications is required to meet this purpose. For example, a CRM system may submit a query to an accounting system so that a call center agent can get a full picture of the customer’s billing history with a company. Or, an application that validates employee security badges may rely on a real-time feed of data from an ERP system that stores employee status information. Application integration is about connecting business applications at a functional level. It’s not simply data sharing, but rather, involves triggering some activity in another application by issuing requests or sending “live” business events.

So how does this affect applications in the cloud? Architects are wary of attempting synchronous remote procedure calls across the Internet. Latency is a big factor, and synchronous actions don’t scale particularly well.One alternative approach: “callbacks” where the application request is issued asynchronously, and the reply is sent to a pre-determined location that is monitored by the calling application. Or, embrace the more scalable asynchronous messaging strategy where business data is sent between systems using a fire-and-forget technique. Whether synchronous or asynchronous, application integration with cloud endpoints involves a high likelihood of encountering REST (vs. traditional SOAP) web service endpoints, so choose your tools accordingly!

To this end, you’ll come across two types of application integration products: traditional platforms that have been extended to work with the cloud, as well as entirely new platforms that are built and hosted in cloud platforms. Because each Tier 3 customer gets their own VLAN(s) that can connect to the corporate network (see Network Integration below), it’s relatively straightforward to use existing on-premise integration servers (e.g. Microsoft BizTalk Server, TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus, IBM WebSphere MQ) to link to applications running in the Tier 3 cloud.

If you’re looking to do application integration between SaaS applications and servers in the Tier 3 cloud, you can either use on-premises integration servers or one of the newer cloud-based tools. For one-way messaging that requires durability but not the weight of an integration server, consider cloud-based queues such as Amazon SQS. Note that Tier 3 servers don’t receive a public IP address by default, so any integration tool that requires a “push” from the public internet to a Tier 3 server will require you to add a public IP address to the target server. If you need a full-fledged messaging engine that runs in the cloud and has adapters for cloud endpoints, consider something like the CloudHub from Mulesoft.

Data Integration

Data integration refers to the synchronization, transformation, quality processing, and  transportation of large amounts of data between repositories. Unlike application integration, data integration is typically batch-oriented and works against data that’s already been processed by transactional systems. You’ll often find the need for data integration when doing master data management (MDM) solutions, importing dirty data from a variety of sources, or loading data warehouses for in-depth analysis.

Doing extract-transform-load (ETL) processes in the cloud introduces a few new considerations. While latency may not be as big of a factor for batch processes, bandwidth will be. Moving petabytes of data over an Internet connection is still not a speedy endeavor. Where possible, consider a Cross Connect architecture to maximize bandwidth while minimizing latency. Data integration solutions frequently include staging databases where data is manipulated or standardized as part of the processing pipeline. Depending on where the data is coming from, you may choose to stage sensitive data on your internal network instead of storing it temporarily on public cloud-based servers. Also, keep in mind that data integration tools are oriented towards relational databases, but many cloud databases leverage NoSQL designs or highly distributed architectures that may be unfamiliar to enterprise staff that primarily works with Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM technologies.

As with the application integration tools, the data integration tools market consists of existing players that may offer adapters to cloud endpoints, as well as entirely new providers that are oriented to cloud-based data repositories. Tools like Microsoft SQL Data Sync make it easy to synchronize Microsoft SQL Server databases running in Windows Azure to SQL Servers running on-premises or in public clouds like Tier 3. Traditional ETL provider Informatica has an innovative cloud service called Informatica Cloud which includes a growing set of adapters for connecting cloud databases to on-premises databases. Even the Amazon Web Services Data Pipeline service makes it simple to transfer data between AWS databases and on-premises databases. In each case, the ETL tool uses a locally-installed server agent that securely connects the data repositories to your network. This means that you do NOT need to have your internal databases exposed to the public internet in order to synchronize with cloud-based data repositories.

If you run your enterprise databases in the Tier 3 cloud, you can perform data integration using existing ETL tools or any of this new crop of cloud-friendly products.

Network Integration

Ideally, cloud servers are simply an extension of on-premises servers. To have a fully integrated enterprise landscape, servers in the corporate data center should be able to freely communicate with servers running off-premises. For example, Tier 3 customers use our cloud to run their enterprise collaboration environment, email infrastructure, line of business applications, and many other critical internal-facing systems. In order for these scenarios to work, the enterprise network must be extended to include the cloud network.

One choice is to set up simple client virtual private networks (VPNs) that connect an individual machine to the cloud network. In this case, an individual user would establish a VPN connection and access the application or database residing on the cloud server. However, this only works well for small businesses or temporary access to applications. For a persistent connection between networks, consider working with the cloud provider on a point-to-point VPN tunnel. This provides a much better end user experience. An even tighter integration is possible through Direct Connect. For enterprises that use one of our co-location partners for their data center hosting, Tier 3 can establish a cross-connect between the physical hardware. This ensures a high performing connection that doesn’t travel over the public internet channel. If cross-connect isn’t an option, then perhaps a MPLS network mesh with any number of major network carriers is feasible. We can easily add a secure connection from your MPLS network to the Tier 3 cloud.

Identity Integration

Finally, security. It’s an important consideration when working with distributed systems, and identity management is an oft overlooked area. We’ve all become accustomed to countless credentials for the variety of business systems (on-premises and off-premises) that we use every day. Whether accessing cloud systems, integrating with partner systems, or enabling a remote workforce, a strong identity management strategy is key. How can employees use a single set of credentials to access a diverse range of systems across the Internet? Is centralized role-based-access-control possible or does each application have to maintain their own role hierarchy? These are among the many questions you should ask yourself when figuring out a long term identity strategy.

Identity federation is an emerging area in the cloud. There are multiple standards that come into play, including SAML, XACML, and WS-Trust. Microsoft offers its Windows Active Directory Federation Services and Windows Azure Active Directory products. You’ll also find strong products from Ping Identity and CA. As enterprises face more and more demand by employees and partners to “bring your own identity”, there will be a greater need to invest in a complete identity management solution.

Tier 3 supports SAML for access to our Control Portal. So, our customers can manage their cloud environment without ever manually logging in. This not only makes it convenient, but also creates a more secure environment where there are fewer passwords to remember and access is controlled from a central location.

Summary

By planning for all four of these integration dimensions, enterprises can more fully achieve the benefit of cloud computing while getting maximum reuse out of existing assets. Neglecting any one of these can introduce barriers to adoption or lead to inefficient or insecure workarounds.

Want our help designing your solution for each of these integration dimensions? Contact us to set up a working session with our experienced services team.

Richard: I suspect that when you planned the Tier 3 re-design, you also looked at what our peers in the industry have done with their own web presence.  Without naming names, what sort of things did you see that you liked, and disliked?

Nate: One thing we noticed while doing a competitive audit was that many cloud company websites felt very “cards close to the vest.” Granted, there would be tons of information, but nothing that actually shows what the customer experience is like. It felt like as if there was a standard checklist of benefits and specs that had to be on the site, but nothing to supports those claims with product experience demonstrations.

Part of my job as Creative Director for Tier 3 is being an experience designer, so I appreciate anytime one of our competitors–or any company for that matter–demonstrates the actual product experience through things like screencasts, screenshots, or demo accounts. It really puts your product (and company) out there, and demonstrates a level of confidence that I think is lacking from many traditional enterprise vendors. Cloud providers or hosts in general, at a certain level can all have the max number of IOPS, bandwidth, available CPU or memory, but our customer experience is what I believe to be a key differentiator and competitive advantage.

Richard: What are the hallmarks of a useful, visually appealing corporate website? How do you balance the need to capture the visitor’s attention while not creating a superficial experience?

Nate: Clearly communicating what it is your company does and making it easy for potential customers to know what their experience will be like should they choose you. Once you’ve got that, then the rest is easy.

Richard: What was missing in the previous Tier 3 website and what did you want to make sure we had in this version?

Nate: Honestly, we suffered from the very thing I didn’t like listed above. We didn’t show the customer experience. Therefore it was harder than necessary to communicate our value to peers and customers.

Richard: A good CMS seems to be critical to an agile, maintainable website. How did you go about identifying the CMS that Tier 3 uses?

Nate: Besides the standard list of features a CMS is supposed to deliver (security, stability, scalability) one to the first considerations was using a CMS that had the flexibility to allow us to execute our creative vision. We ended up choosing ExpressionEngine by Ellis Lab. It met all our needs, plus it has a great community of developers around it.

Richard: What are the technologies used in the new Tier 3 website?

Nate: Nothing too fancy, we customized a version of Bootstrap to use as our front-end framework. Other front-end tech includes Jquery, HTML/CSS, and a little bit of custom javascript here and there. ExpressionEngine is our CMS of choice, which we host with a LAMP stack.

Richard: What aspect of the site are you the most proud of, and why?

Nate: Customer experience is one of the major differentiators for Tier 3, so I’m most proud of showing the product experience. That, and the fact that we can easily iterate on the site content and layout with our content management system. In fact, we’re working on improvements right now…