Cloud Expo: The Rules Of Cloud Design Exposed

The days of "get 'er done" cloud cowboys are over. So are the days of building just to build without the proper design.

During his keynote address at Cloud Expo New York on Tuesday, Tony Bishop, CEO of cloud design vendor Adaptivity, outlined the science required to design and build effective cloud computing solutions while highlighting the eight rules of cloud design.

Illustrating his point with a short video, Bishop compared the cloud to the advent of buildings -- if buildings were discovered just 60 years ago -- where buildings were erected without proper design, rendering them underutilized and grossly inadequate before blueprints were created to ease design and building. The same applies to IT and the cloud, he said, noting that standards, design, math, logic and experience all must converge to design blueprints for IT systems and cloud computing environments.

According to Bishop, the cloud creates a crossroads between business processes and how systems are engineered. Meanwhile, IT becomes the new business supply chain and enterprises cloud enable new businesses delivery paradigms. Lastly, he said "IT's time has come to mature as a multidisciplinary science."

"The cloud is now becoming the intersection point of both of those [business processes and systems]," he said.

To unlock the true potential of the new cloud computing paradigm -- which has become an imperative -- companies must focus on the science of clouds. More specifically, companies must become experts in the economics, physics, management science and information science as they pertain to the cloud.

On the economics side, information must be available on what moving applications to the cloud will cost and how that will relate to the services that are expected. Meanwhile, as IT becomes the new supply chain, management science must be implemented to determine the end-to-end set of processes and their distribution, configuration, logistical tradeoffs and optimization.

Cloud deployments also require physics to determine the speed, time and distance of the data and what is expected to be accomplished. Lastly, information science to classify, collect, document how data is being kept, analyzed and interpreted should play a role.

Next: Eight New Rules For Cloud Design

With science in mind, Bishop highlighted the eight new rules for cloud design. The rules are:

• Incorporate multi-disciplinary science for doing business in the cloud.
• Create an economic model of demand and supply linked to business processes.
• Institute supply chain mapping and analytic discipline.
• Profile workflow and information flow.
• Correlate physics, SCM and workloads into cloud design.
• Cloud design must include instrumentation, measurement and monitoring for sustainability.
• One size does not fit all.
• Cloud design must include execution management that brokers service, ensures service entitlement and enforces security and optimization strategies.

"It's time to take IT to the next level," Bishop said.