Planning and provisioning consistent development, testing and production environments is not for the faint of heart. Tools for managing elements within traditional corporate IT environments are rather mature and well-established, but their value has yet to really be adapted for the rapid emergence of cloud computing. Cloud Computing solutions have long promised to eliminate the costs and headaches associated with deploying infrastructure elements for large IT projects, but the payoff has been elusive. Not to mention that there is still a great deal of confusion over what cloud computing actually is, and the value it offers.

Amazon Web Services launched it’s offering in an attempt to create an innovate service where the infrastructure could be virtual, commoditized and utilized incrementally both internally, and externally by customers who needed infrastructure resources. They not only brought an innovative set of services to market, they also spawned an entirely new opportunity and challenges for anyone who sought to use the service. Delivering processing, storage, application messaging and batch processing capabilities on an financially incremental basis was a huge move. However, the lack of tools for managing and integrating cloud environments with existing traditional enterprise environments have contributed to the difficulty with adoption firms must grapple with.

We listened in on a webinar yesterday where firms Rightscale and CohesiveFT demonstrated a combined solution which offers a level of manageability and scalability which makes Amazon Web Services (AWS) “Infrastructure as a service” a reality, allowing IT to more easily align their resources with the teams which develop and manage the application layer without the need to over-purchase equipment to create multiple uniform but distinct environments. When RightScale recently surveyed their users regarding why they were choosing a cloud management platform, the top three responses centered on managing complexity, automation of management task and the speed to deployment such a platform offers. They cited the case of one customer who was able to scale from 40 to 4,000 servers in a matter of 36 hours; a basically impossible and unfathomably costly endeavor if you’re using traditional rack or blade servers in a conventional data center.

RightScale and CohesiveFT demonstrated a case where they provisioned two servers with different configurations, in separate AWS zones in the US and Europe, all managed centrally through a single console. RightScale provides the capability to manage all aspects of instantiating virtual resources including their configurations, local security, monitoring, change management and auditing. CohesiveFT enables the ability to create VPN’s which can be used as a “overlay” management sub-net. This provides the security and connectivity which makes it a viable global solution since in enables management and connectivity of the instances across geographic zones via a virtual sub-net on which the instances communicate. The solution also allows the cloud to easily integrate with existing physical data center elements.

Cloud Computing is obviously here to stay, and as solutions for deploying and managing cloud environments mature, cloud computing become a more viable alternative for enterprises looking to squeeze the all the value out of their IT dollar. With the ability to adjust resources and spending on different environments at different stages of the application development and deployment process, organizations can eliminate headaches and waste which always accompany any large application deployment project.

If you’re interested in seeing exactly how RightScale and CloudFT work together, you can watch the recorded version of the webinar we attended at RightScale.com

Tags: Amazon Web Services, Cloud Computing, CohesiveFT, RightScale