Thoughts on Cloud management solutions - Rightscale

I have been lucky to do some serious work with several cloud management solutions in the last couple of years. I thought it would be useful to put my thoughts on paper and this will be the first of a few posts. In the next posts I will also talk about Cloudformation and Chef.

A few years ago I started working with Rightscale, on top of Amazon Web Services. The main selling point (at least, from my perspective) of Rightscale is the ability to be multi-cloud. AWS is obviously supported but also Rackspace and more recently players such as Azure and Google's Compute Engine are part of the deal.

The nice thing about Rightscale is that it provides ready to use, fully configured server templates, which can be configured by attaching scripts or cookbooks to it, and passing along the right parameters. Typically they operate on top of bare server images, which are available in the different clouds and configuration is done upon boot time.

I really like that model, it provides tremendous flexibility and by having a rich set of pre-defined server templates Rightscale allows you to get started very quickly.

The downside is that it mainly uses scripting (bash, ruby, powershell and sometimes chef) which is not so easy to maintain. Also the development environment to create, deploy and test these scripts are far from user friendly, which results in a relatively cumbersome experience.

The multi-cloud thing then, is excellent. That is: if you need it. If you really need to support multiple clouds, this is the way to go, but in my view most customers are perfectly served by sticking to one public cloud vendor. Regardless which one you choose, I don't believe you'll gain a lot by hopping from one vendor to another. And, glad you mentioned it, disaster recovery can be achieved using multiple (for instance AWS) regions, as they are fully decoupled by nature and don't require throwing another vendor in the mix. But if you are a product vendor, serving customers with different preferences you probably have no choice.

In case you don't need this multi-cloud thing it might really get in your way. In the end, it restricts you to the largest common denominator and since this market is so much in flux (almost 100 product announcements in 2012 for AWS) this is not the most appealing model.

Note that Rightscale does allow you to use cloud specific features (which you really need for deploying a realistic application), but then the question pops up: why not use the AWS management console straight away. These native consoles and APIs are almost always more feature rich as well.

For example, mid 2011 Amazon launched the full-blown VPC functionality as we currently know it, and we were very tempted to use it. However in order to use it we had to upgrade our Rightscale license and even then we would have access to a very limited form of VPC functionality. We couldn't use the AWS functionality itself, as RS (at that time) didn't allow us to launch a server in a particular subnet. So basically we were significantly lagging behind, which wouldn't have been the case if we would use AWS directly.

So you really have to decide whether the multi-cloud feature makes it worth sacrificing some of the flexibility you have when using the native functionality itself. In the end, it is all about portability and how much it is worth to you. It simply depends on your needs.