As we head into VMWorld week, the focus of my attention is going to be on all the cool new cloud technology that will shown off there, and what our competition has come up with.   However, I've been talking to a number of prospects for our managed cloud computing services in the last week, and it struck me that none of them asked me anything about all the wonderful technology ENKI deploys into its PrimaCloud service.   How can this be: the world is drowning in hype about cloud computing, and our next slate of customer partners don't care about cloud at all?   (Of course, they DO care about what the technology can give them!)

At the same time, I was interviewing a potential VP of Bus Dev for ENKI who asked me to characterize our customers.   This made me realize that the central question for our prospects is:

Do you want to be a Cloud Superman or a Business Superstar?

Our customers want to be business superstars. Most of them view the necessary evil of operations as something they haven't been able to get away from until they found ENKI, and that if they had their choice, they'd be focused on imagining the best way to grow their business 10x in the next year, not what the infrastructure needs to be to accomplish that, or how much knowledge of cloud computing they have amassed in the process.  They know that their total cost of operations includes the consequences of all the mistakes one can make in managing software deployments in cloud or colo infrastructure.  Often, they are experienced executives who have already made those mistakes, much like we did at startups and enterprises many years ago, and are not eager to repeat them.

We have a new customer, Krome Photos, who has an amazing outsourced photo-retouching/editing service that you can use to get what you previously needed a professional photographer to give you - but with your own pictures, and at a fraction of the cost.   He gave us his entire operations responsibility, and we've expanded his infrastructure to keep up with his ever-accelerating growth.  Now, he's preparing to charge for his beta product - almost unheard of in the Web2.0 world.   I think of him as a Business Superstar!

To be sure, we get a lot of contacts from people who are worried about a 5-cent difference in CPU-per-hour cost, or whether we use Sun or NetApp storage systems, or whether they might lose some control over their production environment if they can't physically touch the servers or log in to the IPMI interface.   Often those people don't become our customers or are impossible for us to provide our exceptional services to, since they aren't asking us to help them with what we do best, which is to take responsibility for their production IT deployments.

For example, we have one customer who thought his business was "too large" for a smaller cloud company like ENKI.   But he wanted to try us out anyway to compare us to Amazon.   So, he put his database in our cloud and his business logic layer into Amazon.  The result is that if there is network congestion or Amazon suffers one of its regular "5pm doldrums", his application goes down.   And he points the finger at ENKI.  Unfortunately, as much as we'd like to, there is little we can do to save him from this situation because it's an architectural nightmare.  He gets to be a Cloud Superman, but his business suffers.   And he's not our biggest customer, but our smallest!

So, are you a cloud superman, or a business superstar?   Drop me a line with our comment form below!

If you happen to be at VMWorld, come visit us a breakfast seminar we're putting on with one of our vendor-partners, Voltaire, which makes outstanding hardware as well as truly understanding cloud infrastructure.  We'll be discussing "Designing Managed Clouds for Growth" on Wednesday September 1 at the Marriot next door to VMWare.   Register at www.voltaire.com/vmworld-seminar

For a while now, I've been extolling the virtues of combining cloud computing with on-demand IT operations services such as system administration, software deployment, and incident response because it allows organizations to take on IT projects that otherwise would be beyond their skills or budgets.   While we have many customers here at ENKI who simply purchase computer time from us in the cloud model, a growing percentage are combining it with our operations services (PrimaCare) to meet interesting challenges.  Today I want to relate an amazing success story of one of our customers, Sitebuilder Corporation, who leveraged our fully-managed cloud IT service.  First, a quick summary of what happened, and then the story:

To summarize:

• SiteBuilder deployed a 350-seat website development network in a hotel with less than a day's work
• PrimaCloud scalable cloud computing was used to deliver the development environment without any foreknowledge of required resources
• Resources were measured using our monitoring system and adjusted on-the-fly to measure and match demand
• PrimaCare outsourced IT services found performance problems and fixed them on-the-fly
• Event was a success!
• On completion of event, infrastructure is disposed of and re-created for next event so SiteBuilder pays only for what they use
• Websites developed during the event can be migrated seamlessly to permanent hosting in the cloud
• Customer accomplished the event with no permanent IT staff, no IT knowledge, and only a few days' preparation

The Story:

We've had a web design company, SiteBuilder Corporation, as a customer for a couple years now.   They are so exclusive that they barely have a website, just getting business from referrals.  Their primary focus is assisting their customers in building mass-marketing websites.  Once those sites are built, they host them on shared infrastructure provided by ENKI, with operations services coverage so that their business doesn't need a 24x7 IT staff to handle the "distraction" of hosting.  In fact, aside from a single programmer, our customer has no IT staff at all.

Recently they decided to write software that automated their web-design process, allowing anyone to easily build their own marketing website and start selling on the internet.   They worked with a  partner to teach people how to use the web-site-building software in the context of a 5-day internet marketing seminar taught at a hotel by a renowned marketing guru. After the class, students could move their website to cloud-based hosting and start their internet businesses.  The class sold out quickly and they called us and asked us to provide a solution to hosting their interactive software for building 350 students' websites as they built them during the seminar.  Their biggest concern was that 350 people all pressing "submit" at once would either bring down the server or saturate the hotel's network.  They feared that to solve these problems, they would need to bring an unknown number of servers onsite, and wire up a network to run the class - something they didn't know how to do.   The bandwidth problem was addressed by choosing a hotel with twin 30 Mb/sec links to the internet - and hence to ENKI's infrastructure.  However, none of us knew what the seminar would do to a server.

ENKI responded by allocating a large virtual server in our VMWare-based PrimaCloud product, which can scale the server on-the-fly to match demand.   We knew that we could size the server up to the full capacity of the physical hardware, which was 24 cores and 96GB of RAM - if we needed to.   We set up a 4-core, 16GB server for the customer, pre-installing the Wordpress framework on which their software operated, and testing it.  We also worked with the customer to do some load testing, which looked good.  However, we all knew that actual students would exercise the system in ways that the load testing could never achieve.   In addition, this was the first major deployment of the web-site-creation software, so we had to be ready for anything.  So, we applied our enterprise-grade server/application monitoring on the server which allowed us to see how busy it was, and what was going on inside the application software - in this case Apache and MySQL.

Yesterday, the seminar began, and our technicians watched the load on the server rise slowly and then peak when the students all submitted their "homework."   Disaster!  The load on the server climbed to 200 (the number of programs waiting to run) and all 16GB of RAM were used up.   So our team upped the allocation on the server to 32GB and 8 cores, and still it wasn't enough - we got frustrated calls from the event saying it was too slow.  So we upped the resources again, and the class proceeded, albeit more slowly than they had hoped.

Our operations services staff was looking at the server the entire time, and saw that there were tremendous numbers of open database connections with uncompleted queries causin lots of Apache threads to lie around and use up CPU and memory without getting anything done.   So we sat down with our customers' developer to look at their code, and we also examined the database transactions to see why the queries were not completing.  What we found was that both WordPress and the customer's code were generating queries against improperly indexed tables in the database.   A few small changes to the database setup were made and today, the class is proceeding along snappily with just 4 cores and 10GB of RAM, with a server load of 0.5!  Because we had been able to profile the customer's software in real time, we were able to fix performance problems and right-size the cloud deployment to save them money.

Our customer's partner is planning more seminars in different cities, and they will be paying only for compute and operations services during the time then need them.

When I realized how well this was working, I was stunned by how our outsourced cloud IT model had enabled our customers to accomplish something that had previously been impossible with their resources.  In the past, they would have had to hire an IT organization to go to the venue to build a network, set up multiple-server infrastructure, and deploy the software.  Moving the seminar from city to city would have been difficult and very expensive, involving a large staff of technically capable "roadies."

Today, we received a text from our customer, saying "Your help turned me from public enemy to rock star over night ... I thank you for your effort and expertise from the bottom of my soul!!!!"