Now THIS is loosely coupled automation infrastructure!

The Elastic Server team recently announced the ability to use the ES Factory to assemble and deploy images to Eucalyptus Clouds and has been working with some trial users on our test platform. Last week it was released to our production site.

2pm: Released to production

2:07pm Inbound "contact me" email from our website:

Name: "new euca guy"
Email: "new euca guy"@gmail.com
Subject: Eucalyptus Deployment Request
Message: I wanted to enable my cloud with your service.

2:30pm One of our team points this person to the page in ES where you enter your Eucalyptus Credentials to connect to a Eucalyptus cloud.

4pm Response from this new ES and Eucalyptus user
"Congrats!
My first build from ES to a private cloud worked and worked well."


Ok. So do that Opsware, Bladelogic, or Tivoli Provisioning Manager! This is one of the manifestations of virtualized infra and cloud computing that I think is still being missed; automation infrastructure is available to everyone, not just the Fortune 500.

Remember the McKinsey Cloud paper flurry of a few weeks ago? The trade press missed the point. Their headline was "McKinsey has concerns about the cloud". Actually if you look at the slides the real headline was "McKinsey doesn't believe that the largest global enterprises in the world can move their data center operations wholesale to Amazon EC2 (duh!), but other than that probably OK for everyone else!" (They actually said "clouds are very cost effective for SMEs".)

Well great - because that is most of us! Many large organizations work on a quite fragmented basis where the business units have autonomy and control. Really more a collective of SMEs than one enterprise. Let's grab them too.

Solutions like those provided by CohesiveFT and RightScale bring a level of automation infrastructure that your average IT department has never had the time or money to take advantage of. As we approach a 2.5 times an order of magnitude increase in the number of servers that we collectively assemble, deploy and manage (on our way to 250,000,000 VMs folks), loosely coupled automation infrastructure is going to absolutely change the game of enterprise IT.