As organizations become increasingly reliant on integrated data center applications, deploying these applications is becoming a key business priority and a formidable operational challenge for IT teams. Responsibility for these applications – from managing release cycles to servicing lifecycles – is shifting to datacenter operations.

Traditionally, application release and deployment tasks have been performed manually, or semi-manually based on scripting. However, due to the complexity of multi-tier applications, the growing number of application environments and dependencies, and the sheer volume of operational tasks, manual approaches have become increasingly error-prone. As a result, application release and deployment tasks are resulting in delays, configuration errors, and release failures that undermine application reliability. Furthermore, this tedious manual work may result in increased operating and maintenance costs.

To address these challenges, a new application service model is needed to automate and orchestrate routine and emergency application tasks. These solutions should help IT operation teams execute and manage application service tasks and build reliable processes across application silos and the entire datacenter application lifecycle.

–

Read the rest of this IDC White Paper on www.noliosoft.com

SIIA OnDemand is dedicated to understanding the business drivers around SaaS and cloud computing. SIIA OnDemand  2009 is especially interesting, because it will be focused on identifying new ways for SaaS companies to drive revenue. Panelist and presenters such as myself will be sharing actual real-world successes that you can learn from and apply to your own business.

Nolio’s presentation will be one of just a few early-stage, innovative companies that provide Software as a Service and Cloud solutions. Being a selected Previews Presenting Company at SIIA OnDemand will enable me to present our application automation solution to an audience of leading vendors, executives, and industry influencers. I am excited to be there and see it as a great opportunity to highlight the ways in which Nolio’s application automation solution streamlines application service tasks in the cloud.

I’m also looking forward to listening to the speakers, which include industry leaders such as ars Dalgaard, Founder & CEO of SuccessFactors, the fastest growing public software company in the world; Michael Lock of Google; Zach Nelson of NetSuite; Elliot Curtis of Microsoft; and many other speakers and panelists.

I’m very excited to be a part of SIIA OnDemand 2009. The quality of the speakers is exceptional and the conference presents tremendous networking opportunities. I’ll write more about my SIIA OnDemand 2009 experience when I’m back, so please stay tuned for my next post.

“When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about”. (Albert Einstein)

The trick is focusing on what you do best. This is a well known truism and it is the premise for SaaS. Beyond the cost savings - opex vs. capex and all that – the reason SaaS is such a successful model is that it allows the enterprise to focus on its competitive advantage and leave the rest to be handled by a competent service provider.

What is true for the enterprise should be true for the SaaS ISV. And if you look around, you will notice that most SaaS providers are also SaaS consumers. From CRM to Marketing generation, to financials, to you-name-it – SaaS companies are adopters of SaaS technology. (Of course most SaaS companies are even greater adopters of open source; hey, it’s free!).

Still, most on-demand providers are running their own data centers, the network, the servers, the storage, and I would dare to say, not excelling in that department. SaaS technologists are product people. Innovative, creative, not harnessed by process or procedure. The typical data center is a product of evolution gone haywire. You start up with a couple of servers, and slowly build up, slapping a switch here, a database there, buying a cheap router, until it becomes quite unmanageable. And they probably do not have the right staff to design and maintain the infrastructure.

SaaS companies are finding it hard to let go of their infrastructure assets, but more and more are realizing that they simply suck at the job. Especially if they are big enough for it to matter, but too small to do a good job.

Networking, hosting, storage and server management have become a commodity. And as such, shouldn’t you let someone else do the job?

Enter the managed service providers. They will take care of every tier that you will allow them access to. From hosting, to networking, servers, storage, database monitoring and management, and many are interested in taking over the application management, if you just let them. It is the next tier and probably most lucrative.

This is the point where the guy with the funny pajamas, pointed ears and the cape appears in a flash and says “enough!’

Nobody does it better than you (the SaaS ISV). Your application will never become a commodity. You built the app, you know it intimately, understand the domain and can react quickly when something goes awry.

You should build your operations team around application and domain expertise, not around networking or server configuration. And you should equip your ops team with the tools to monitor and manage the application. This includes instrumentation, end-user-experience monitoring and application management automation.

The domain of infrastructure management tools is so well developed, with so many solutions abound, that SaaS operations usually tend to invest there and not where it matters most – the application.

—
Nolio Application Service Automation is a software platform for designing and executing automated application service workflows across the data center, enabling reliable, effective processes for the management of application change.

One of the biggest appeals of the SaaS model is that upgrades are seamless and transparent. You log off in the evening with one version and the next morning when you log in, voila! you have an upgraded version with all the bug fixes and new features.

What happens in the background is another story. Scary sometimes. A Midnight Summer’s Nightmare.

If you, a SaaS company, have your SLAs in place and adhere to them, your full upgrade windows (i.e. planned downtime) are probably few and far between. Some SLAs allow for a periodic one hour downtime with a week’s notification, but anything longer than one hour will require an earlier notification. You must ensure that the upgrade is performed within that window, or any minute beyond that will start counting against your SLAs. You do not want to extend that window unnecessarily, as your customers are counting on your 24X7 service.

Upon receiving the upgrade instructions from Engineering, you will need to start building a plan. Often, the plan will include dozens, or even hundreds of short steps, and complex dependencies. In order to ensure that the upgrade will be performed correctly and within the allotted time frame you should be able to answer the following questions:

• How long will it take the team to run the upgrade?
• What happens if you need to rollback?
• What is the point of no return, when you must rollback without violating the change window?

A mature SaaS operations group will likely have a Staging environment, closely mimicking production. The best way to go about planning and executing the upgrade is to perform the process on the Staging environment. You will need to carefully design the procedure and run it multiple times until you perfect the process, taking note of how long it takes and practicing the rollback.

This is a tedious process, treasured by engineers as much as they love deciphering undocumented legacy code. But it is essential to ensure success.

So you need to make the process as short as possible and measurable. If you had the tools to automate the procedure you could reduce the time of execution (and of the dry runs on Staging). You could know exactly how long it will take and have the needed repeatability. Repeatability cannot be overrated when encroaching upon the Holy of Holies, under the pressure of timetables and the short temper of the anxious COO/VP Ops.

Since upgrades are an integral part of a SaaS operation and one of the main causes of the gray hair, ulcers, I wanna go home factor, you would do yourself and your customers a great service if you had the tools to automate the entire process.

If I had a great idea for the next killer app (I have, actually) and if I had unlimited funds (I don’t, actually) I would have built the software as an on-demand offering.

I would have spent half my funds on building the operational support systems – provisioning, billing, retention policy, self-service, report generator, etc. The other half would be invested in building instrumentation, redundancy, automation, integration, application level monitoring, silent upgrades, customer notifications, and so on.

The rest of the money (you may wonder about my math, but hey, I’ve got unlimited funds) would go towards building the actual application.

Most SaaS vendors out there (and they are growing fast) have chosen the predictable path of building the application first, and worrying about serviceability later. This is the fastest way of getting to market with low costs. The next step is choosing some viable hosting solution and off we go, offering the world our ever better CRM.

Many months and dozens of customers later, reality hits with all the issues of servicing the software, rapid growth and dealing with labor intensive tasks that are the humdrum of daily life in a SaaS operation. Provisioning/de-provisioning, configuration changes, customized reports, and the most dreaded – upgrades, task the team as a whole, especially when the product is successful and the number of customers is growing daily.

It is not that SaaS executives, architects and engineers are lacking in any way. On the contrary, they are mostly smart, inventive, and creative and have a deep understanding of their customers’ needs in the specific domain. The problem is that they are product people, not service people. Practically none of them come from IT and cannot envision the life of a service operations engineer.

At this point, automation becomes crucial to the survival of the business.

Whether it is built into the next version (many architectures make this quite difficult) or done externally, automation is needed to reduce costs, physical labor, frustration and mainly, error-prone manual procedures. Repeatability, which is a derivative of automation, is also crucial.

Automation is needed across the board. Be it in setting up a new server, or building a new application instance. It could be a manual procedure regarding provisioning of application resources, or building a seamless upgrade procedure.

Outages happen. How quickly can you recover from a service disruption and ensure that the recovery does not create it own problems? Automation not only provides the routines for quick recovery, but instills a discipline of thinking out the necessary steps, discovering dependencies and planning ahead. An added benefit of automation is that it documents the process so you can go back and review the best and worst of your procedures.

In my next post I will take a closer look at the SaaS Upgrade Nightmare.

Click here to read more about Automation and Delegation.