RightScale CEO: We enable the enterprise cloud

Customers often approach “the cloud” as if it were some big-box store where IaaS (infrastructure as a service) can be purchased as a commodity. That may be marginally true for simple backup or for dev and test, where the risk of failure is not a big deal. But companies that wish to stand up mission-critical production applications on, say, Amazon Web Services, rapidly discover they need to become experts in the intricacies of the platform.

RightScale, an independent SaaS provider, shoulders much of the burden of building out enterprise-class server deployments for IaaS. It delivers a top layer of management and automation in the form of templates for Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, and other providers, as well as for private cloud infrastructure built on technology from Citrix, Eucalyptus, and OpenStack. Best practices are built right in.

InfoWorld executive editor Doug Dineley and I recently spoke with RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, who has a unique perch from which to observe the cloud industry, both on the provider side and the customer side, where he can claim Comcast, PBS, Zynga, and many other big players as part of his customer base. The following is an edited version of that conversation. We were particularly intrigued by Crandell’s take on the entry of HP and Microsoft into the IaaS business.

First, we asked him to explain why customers should go to RightScale instead of going directly to an IaaS provider.

Eric Knorr: Say I just want to manage virtual machines on Amazon. What value does RightScale bring to the equation?

Michael Crandell: The first piece is really the automation. There are apps that are amazing in terms of sys admins and servers — that are able to manage literally thousands of servers through automation, autoscaling, auto-failover, things like that.

RightScale is sort of the big eye in the sky monitoring on these servers. We might detect, for example, that the CPU load had gone up on a bank of app servers. If it went too high for too long across too many machines, let’s launch some new app servers. Well, you’re now launching new app servers into a particular cluster or deployment that might be running — if you take Zynga as an example — Cityville or Farmville.

For the sake of this example, we’re just scaling the app servers, not the database layer. So how do the app servers when they launch know how to fold themselves in and configure themselves to be part of the rest of this whole system? That’s the dynamic configuration we provide. We use a particular piece of IP that we created for that; we call it a Server Template.

A Server Template in simple terms is still a machine image at the base, reduced down to the plain vanilla OS and a few super common utilities. And then everything that loads to make that server whatever it is in life happens dynamically at launch time.

Doug Dineley: Then the server template is not really a template. It’s a set of scripts.

Crandell: It’s a set of scripts, the one difference being that you can abstract out variables from the scripts and pass them in at launch time. So in that sense it is a template for, say, an app server — and you can pass in a launch time, where is the database, what’s the host’s name, where are the other app servers, where’s the load balancer — and RightScale can dynamically figure that stuff and pass it in. In that way you can make a model of an app server that you can use all over the place.

You could do the same thing with a piece of blog software, say, WordPress, and abstract out the name of the blog; the graphic that it loads with; the admin name, password, and email; stuff like that. Abstract that out and you get a reusable template, if you will, of a blog server that you can run. And it’s a very generalizable concept. I’ve given two examples, but you can imagine.

On top of that construct we decided to build a marketplace. Server templates are cool; they’re reusable. We open this up in two ways: One is for partners to publish and the other is for companies to share — within the company or outside the company. So we actually have a community at RightScale. We have about 55,000 people who have signed up.

To give some examples of ISV partners, we have Riverbed with their for-pay load balancer and Zend, the PHP accelerator company has built a whole scalable cluster.

Knorr: Sounds like a very open platform. How do you control who does what?

An important part of RightScale is governance and access control over what users are able to do. Imagine I worked for a company and on my smartphone I could literally bring up a dozen different accounts with many cloud credentials and cloud resources and probably access to thousands of servers — and I could show it to you and press the wrong button. So we provide access control over what users are able to do according to what roles they play and what permissions they have.

Then there’s auditing and logging. As you know, Amazon is a world where if you start your log files on the local disk and if you’re not using EBS and you terminate the server — it’s gone. So you ask: What happened on that 137th server we launched last Monday for that batch process? It’s gone. So we persist logs, we persist audit entries — which by our definition are like stages of important events — lifecycle stuff. And then cost accounting. We have a lot of visibility into what people are running.

We can report back to them that this deployment, which runs, say, your business intelligence app and cost X amount in terms of compute, storage, and networking last month. We do some predictions on that with our dashboard, too. Then we deliver that as a CSV file that you can take and pump into your accounting system and get some granularity around what your spend is.

Dineley: The business side must like that since Amazon pricing can be a very black box.

Crandell: Also, there’s a piece of this that we call the IT vending machine. It’s a cute name for self-service IT. The notion is that your IT department might get into the heart of this, build some workloads that they might want to provide to business users, then wrap a simple interface that says: Push this button, pick the cloud you want, enter your name and whatever variables. Then they know what workload is going to run there. What’s exciting to us is that they deliver the agility of the cloud with control and governance.

Knorr: But as you say, IT still has to set up the vending machine. To what degree can you insulate IT from having to know the details of implementing infrastructure on Amazon? From what we hear, Amazon customers are often surprised at the level of expertise they need to acquire to make things work.

Crandell: We do a fair amount of insulation. Look, any of us could download MySQL, stick it on a server on Amazon, and run it. But that’s not what people want. They want a resilient, high-performance, backed-up, failover-ready installation of MySQL because it’s their data.

If you’re going to build that, that’s a whole different potato. You have to set up replication, snapshots, you have to have a runbook for what happens when something goes wrong. All of that has been baked into a MySQL set of templates that RighScale happens to provide to paying customers, and it has all of that operational goodness in there — which is frankly becoming more and more of the equation.

Dineley: Is that your main value proposition? I would guess that most of your customers are running lots of servers, and they’re running them for production purposes.

Crandell: Correct.

Dineley: Should I understand the value proposition to be that RightScale brings production readiness to what’s essentially been a development platform — Amazon Web Services?

Crandell: Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.

Dineley: Or is automation the bigger-picture value proposition?

Crandell: Well, the production-readiness you refer to we would call operational excellence — performance, dealing with failures, and so on. Some customers are most interested in the governance aspect. Some are most interested in automation; they may be running huge fleets of servers.

We’ve built a lot of value. I think we have by far the most servers launched that I’ve seen published figures for on the Amazon cloud. You’ve hit it right on. It’s not just dev and test. People come to us when they want to run a business, a mission-critical app.

Knorr: And we’re not merely talking about those who want to deploy on Amazon.

Crandell: Absolutely not. Here’s the situation today as I see it: Really compelling value among these platforms, but no clear single winner. Of course, Amazon is a winner. But one thing that’s happening is that, through this summer, we’re going to see some new public megaclouds on the horizon.

On that note I’m sure you know, because it has leaked, that Microsoft is entering the IaaS business. They’re going right after Amazon. 

Knorr: They’ve been building out that infrastructure for a long time.

Crandell: They know how to operate global, high-level data centers.

Dineley: Are you going to partner with them?

Crandell: We are partnering with them. We have the Azure PaaS (platform as a service) and they’re bringing out IaaS — and they have on-premise software, which is a differentiator from Amazon’s public-only approach. Also, they know how to sell to enterprise customers and they have a lot of them already. That has not been part of Amazon’s DNA, historically.

Knorr: Who else are you supporting? Are you looking at OpenStack?

Crandell: We do look at OpenStack. OpenStack has been a little more momentum than implementation up until recently. HP has launched on it; I think they’ve probably worked some of the kinks out of operating OpenStack at scale. They’ve contributed a lot to the code. And of course Rackspace has adopted it.

Citrix CloudStack is actually installed a lot, both in service providers and larger companies. Eucalyptus was first and has a lot of momentum. That’s why we chose those three. On the cloud front, Amazon has been the big daddy, but Rackspace and SoftLayer are certainly meaningful businesses. Our philosophy is to be Switzerland, to be on the customer’s side so the customer can choose among important options.

This article, “RightScale CEO: We enable the enterprise cloud,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog, and for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.