White Paper Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud, Powered By Intel: Jump- Start Your Adoption of the Cloud-Native Model Sponsored by: Dell EMC and Intel Deepak Mohan April 2017 Laura DuBois IDC OPINION The cloud-native model a modern approach to application architecture, development, and delivery has emerged as a natural evolution in the industry and as a response to the changes in business needs and the infrastructure capability facing the enterprise IT world. This new model has proven its benefits at new economy companies, like Netflix and Hulu, as well as traditional enterprises, such as Ford and Comcast. Through a combination of architectural enhancements, tighter integration between disciplines, and an ability to make rapid changes, the cloud-native model directly increases the speed and agility of application delivery for IT organizations. Broader adoption of the cloud-native model, among traditional enterprises in particular, has been slow due to a number of factors including the effort needed to integrate cloud-native software platforms with infrastructure hardware, limited availability of tooling and expertise, and fragmentation of processes and workflows when using the cloud-native model alongside traditional development. Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud offers enterprises a truly ready-to-use cloud-native platform. It is built on leading Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure utilizing the latest Intel Xeon processors, and comes pre-integrated with the industry-standard Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) cloud-native platform-asa-service (PaaS) platform. In addition, Native Hybrid Cloud comes with built-in hybrid cloud support, allowing organizations to access resources from multiple public cloud services through the same workflows and compliance framework. Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud makes it easier for enterprises to adopt the cloud-native model through its engineered features and extensions, including: A prebuilt platform that integrates leading VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure with industrystandard Pivotal Cloud Foundry cloud-native PaaS environment Hybrid cloud support, enabling organizations to access private and public cloud resources through the same workflows and compliance framework Support for monitoring and management tools for complete visibility and control A single reputed enterprise infrastructure vendor, Dell EMC, delivering the end-to-end cloud-native stack and providing a single point of contact for assistance and troubleshooting IDC believes that organizations that build early competence around the cloud-native model will be able to accelerate their digital transformation (DX) progress and empower their business organizations with the tools needed to build differentiation in the marketplace. Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud offers a platform that enterprises can leverage to jump-start this adoption, without trading off the reliability, compliance, and control framework needed for enterprise IT organizations. April 2017, IDC #US42493417
IN THIS WHITE PAPER This IDC White Paper provides an introduction to the cloud-native model and the benefits it brings to enterprises. It then presents Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud, a turnkey on-premises platform based on Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Intel Xeon processors. SITUATION OVERVIEW Business environments are experiencing an unprecedented rate of change, influenced by the underlying currents of globalization, fast-changing customer needs, and quicker cycles of disruption. Most enterprises acknowledge DX as a top initiative to make their information systems more agile and to stay competitive. In IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2017 Predictions (IDC #US41883016, November 2016), IDC predicts that by 2020, industry-leading organizations will be characterized by their progress along DX-driven benchmarks and metrics. IDC expects that DX initiatives will guide future IT investments at a majority of IT organizations. In this environment of rapid change, speed with which new applications can be delivered, agility to deal with changes, and the ability to leverage data to drive operational and business insights are critical. Using cloud platforms is seen as a fundamental enabler to these goals, and thus cloud is often one of the earliest steps in digital transformation road maps. However, equally important components are the changes in the "people" and "process" side of the IT organization. The cloud-native model has emerged in response to these needs to address the gaps in current application development paradigms and to optimize application platforms for the cloud. This model offers organizations the capability to deal with the rate of change facing their business, resulting in faster turnaround, increased flexibility, and easier scaling. Companies like Netflix, which leverage cloud-native applications extensively, have been able to rapidly scale, introduce services, and delight customers on a continuous basis. Among traditional enterprises, Ford is an example that leverages this technology. Its FordPass mobility solution has eliminated the long lead times associated with operations planning using the cloud-native model. IDC's 2016 Early Adopter DevOps Survey Shows Operational Models and Technology Spending Priorities in Flux (IDC #US41805416, September 2016), which covers 100 decision makers from large enterprises (1,000+ employees) to understand their DevOps adoption, reveals that DevOps adoption is expected to move the code release frequency from quarterly down to weekly/monthly releases. The survey also highlighted that approximately half of the respondents plan to create a DevOps "center of excellence" in their organization, illustrating the increasing recognition of the value of cloud-native principles among enterprise IT buyers. The Cloud-Native Model: An Application Model for Today's Needs The delivery model used for enterprise applications are influenced by three major factors: The speed with which customers' expectations drive new features/applications The needs imposed by the business on the applications The characteristics of the infrastructure platform on which the applications are delivered Figure 1 shows how enterprise application delivery models have evolved over time. Seen through the lens of changes in these factors the need to respond quickly in a rapidly changing environment and the new capabilities introduced by cloud infrastructure the cloud-native model is a natural progression in enterprise application models. 2017 IDC #US42493417 2
FIGURE 1 Evolution of Application Paradigms and the Emergence of the Cloud-Native Model IT Needs - Systems of Record: - Highly customized needs and applications - Slow pace of change in IT needs Monolithic - Designed for specific use case - Changes take time and effort - Designed for mainframes IT Needs - Optimization: - Standardization of back-end applications - Growth in endpoint devices Traditional Client/Server - Separates back end from UI - Leverages standard components where possible - Designed for server-endpoint hardware model IT Needs - Systems of Engagement: - Increasing customization (DX as a differentiator) - High rate of change in application needs Cloud Native - Integrated development and infrastructure ops (DevOps) - Highly modular, resilient, and portable applications - Designed for cloud infrastructure Source: IDC, 2017 The cloud-native model is characterized by new approaches to application development enabled by cloud and other emerging technologies (see Table 1). These include: The DevOps approach. Traditionally, application development and infrastructure operations have been two distinct processes, owned and executed by distinct entities. DevOps refers to an application delivery paradigm where development and operations functionalities are planned together, eliminating the lead times needed for traditional operations planning and deployment processes and improving speed through self-service capabilities. Highly modular, microservice architecture. Microservices are small, discrete components of an application, with known capabilities and functionality. They are designed based on an approach similar to service-oriented architecture (SOA), where each microservice supports a well-defined set of interactions through a common interaction mechanism (such as REST). Unlike SOA, microservices are independently deployable, allowing developers to update individual parts of an application as necessary and push those updates without bringing down the entire application. Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). Traditional development models decouple development from the integration and deployment process. Development is a continuous activity. Integration is a periodic "step function" activity. CI/CD refers to a code integration and deployment process that happens on a continuous basis, alongside development. Software is integrated and tested and deployed as soon as development is complete. Infrastructure hardware abstraction and portability. One of the ways in which cloud-native platforms enable DevOps is by completely abstracting the infrastructure layer from the developer. This may be through standardized provisioning API and infrastructure modules (such as containers) that work on multiple public and private cloud infrastructure and pure platform as a service with minimal or no changes. 2017 IDC #US42493417 3
TABLE 1 How Does the Cloud-Native Model Benefit Enterprises Cloud-Native Attribute Impact to Speed Impact to Agility Impact to Rich Engagement (Through Better Data Insights) DevOps Reduces time to deliver new applications and to scale; improves code quality and better application performance Reduces time needed for scaling Closer integration between business and development teams that leads to richer applications, faster insight, and quick response Microservices Enables distributed development, reuse of components Reduces risk and time needed to add changes Granular model of real-world scenario, which results in closer modeling of real-world objects and more refined decisions CI/CD Reduces lead time to add changes in production Reduces lead time to add changes in production Hardware abstraction Reduces resource provisioning speed from weeks to hours using self-service Flexibility to move workload across infrastructure for performance, compliance, etc. Access to broad set of emerging technologies and products built for cloud-native apps Source: IDC, 2017 Through structured application of these modern cloud-enabled approaches, the cloud-native model empowers IT organizations to: Respond faster to changes needed by reducing the lead time for delivery of functional or scaling changes into production Empower businesses to build better and stronger engagement with their customers, resulting in improved customer retention and new customer acquisition Make and qualify changes to each modular component quickly, without incurring the risks or the lead time involved with large-scale integration and testing of the system Build applications and reusable components that model the real world more closely than previous approaches, enabling richer functionality in the overall application 2017 IDC #US42493417 4
Enterprise Adoption of the Cloud-Native Model Is in Its Early Phase Cloud-native applications are frequently seen at fast-growing new economy companies. But it is believed to be in its early phase of adoption within the broader enterprise community. A recent custom IDC survey (sponsored by Dell EMC) on enterprise cloud adoption, focusing on enterprises around the globe with 500 or more employees, showed that nearly 80% of enterprises that have cloud-native applications in production have only a single cloud-native application. This indicates early piloting of these modern applications. Even though there are benefits to cloud-native applications, there are some challenges delaying quick adoption: Challenges in public and private cloud adoption. The same IDC survey provided insights into the top challenges with public and private cloud usage by enterprises. Security and compliance concerns, traditional application performance, and cost unpredictability were leading challenges among public cloud users. Lack of access to broader value-added services, lack of skill sets available, and high ongoing costs were leading concerns for private cloud usage. Challenges with cloud-native platform adoption. IDC's 2016 Early Adopter DevOps Survey queried enterprise decision makers regarding their challenges with DevOps adoption. As in cloud adoption, lack of skill sets and tooling were again highlighted as a top challenge to adoption of DevOps. These challenges point to the need for consistency and standardization in tooling and workflows for cloud-native application delivery. Process fragmentation, limited traceability, and limited consistency in control mechanisms were top challenges for large enterprises. The early adopters who are able to overcome these issues are seeing positive results and returns. Ford highlights, "Collaboration with Pivotal allows for quicker vehicle software updates and an even better user experience for Ford customers." CoreLogic mentions, "We've actually shown that it [Pivotal's methodology] resulted in a faster time to market at less cost. For us, it's much more than a technology transformation moving to a cloud-native platform. It's a new way to develop products." Cloud Foundry and Pivotal: Standardizing the Cloud-Native Model Through Open Source Collaboration The early phase of cloud-native adoption was largely organic, fragmented, and highly customized. Cloud Foundry was one of the earliest efforts to put together a standard approach and development environment. Originally developed at VMware, Cloud Foundry is now an industry-standard open source PaaS platform for cloud-native development. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a commercial version of the Cloud Foundry platform, offered by Pivotal. The PCF platform includes value-added service integrations, commercial support, and the PCF Service Marketplace. More information about PCF can be found at https://pivotal.io/platform. Figure 2 provides an overview of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry architecture and its key components. 2017 IDC #US42493417 5
FIGURE 2 Pivotal Cloud Foundry Architecture Source: Dell EMC, 2017 IDC's Preparing for Cloud Native, Migration to the Kubernetes Era (IDC #US42195116, December 2016) shows that nearly half of all enterprises prefer sourcing cloud-native and DevOps, enabling technologies through commercially supported open source packages. Pivotal Cloud Foundry brings to market a tested, ready-to-use, and commercially supported Cloud Foundry based environment, which has enabled a number of enterprises to make progress on the cloud and cloud-native model adoption path. Comcast, an early adopter of PCF, reported a 50% increase in development velocity and a 90% reduction in hardware systems in areas where PCF was adopted. Comcast also highlights this as "the first time ever we fully upgraded cloud infrastructure with zero impact in production." 50% increase in development velocity and 90% reduction in hardware systems Comcast 2017 IDC #US42493417 6
The Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud The Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud, powered by Intel Xeon, is a turnkey cloud-native application development platform, designed to overcome emerging challenges with cloud-native application adoption. It is an engineered system built using proven industry-leading technologies VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (built using VMware operating stack on VxRail hardware) and the Pivotal Cloud Foundry cloud-native platform. It includes additional development and monitoring tools to facilitate easy ongoing operations. Native Hybrid Cloud also brings organizations the "hybrid cloud" experience, providing developers access to private and public cloud resources through the same environment. This includes deploying applications to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Dell EMC Virtustream, and the VMWare vcloud Air. The platform comes prebuilt and tested, saving organizations months of design, engineering, and testing effort needed to build a similar environment in-house. Key characteristics of the platform include: Prebuilt solution. Native Hybrid Cloud is delivered to customers pre-engineered, pre-tested, and supported by Dell EMC. Services from Dell EMC handles maintenance and updates to keep the environment up to date, eliminating a large portion of ongoing maintenance and operations costs for the platform. This also allows organizations to focus on the application layer and offload the platform maintenance to Dell EMC. Market-leading components. The platform is built using proven hardware and software stacks and the industry-standard Pivotal Cloud Foundry PaaS. It integrates industry-leading VxRail and VMWare vsphere, both of which have years of engineering, testing, and customer usage behind them. Hybrid cloud. Native Hybrid Cloud provides integrated access to public and private cloud resources to developers through a common environment and through a centralized framework. This allows IT organizations to provide developers with leading public and private cloud resources and to enable innovation, without having to trade off compliance and control while providing flexibility and agility. Pivotal Cloud Foundry integration. The Native Hybrid Cloud comes integrated with the PCF cloud-native development environment. This provides immediate access to the Cloud Foundry PaaS technology, PCF services, and the service Marketplace available with PCF, allowing organizations and developers to jump-start their cloud-native model adoption. This integration also makes Native Hybrid Cloud platform secure and highly available. Developer tools. Beyond PCF and its service Marketplace, Dell EMC has announced its commitment to building developer tools aimed at streamlining the app transformation process and helping enterprises and developers overcome the skill gaps in developing applications in Pivotal Cloud Foundry. An early example of this is the Access Testing Tool, which makes it easy for developers to validate whether traditional apps can function in the new cloud-native environment taking their prior dependencies into consideration. Monitoring and management tools. In addition to the VxRail and PCF components, Native Hybrid Cloud includes Dell EMC monitoring and management tools for operational and maintenance monitoring of the platform. These are consistent with the tools and monitoring experience available with Dell EMC ViPR SRM and Dell EMC Service Assurance Software Suite, providing customers a consistent approach to manage and monitor solutions across the Dell EMC portfolio. Single contact support. The entire Native Hybrid Cloud stack is designed by Dell EMC and its strategically aligned businesses. As such, Dell EMC can offer true full-platform support from a single point of contact, significantly reducing the troubleshooting burden on IT and diluting the ongoing risk of platform life-cycle management. 2017 IDC #US42493417 7
Upgradeability and road map. Through pre-testing of the latest version of hardware, software, and services components, Native Hybrid Cloud provides consistency and reliability without any platform disruption. Figure 3 provides an overview of the Dell EMC architecture and its key components. FIGURE 3 Native Hybrid Cloud Architecture Source: Dell EMC, 2017 Leveraging the Value of Data Insights: The Analytic Insights Module Option In addition to speed and agility, the ability to drive data-driven decision making is a key dimension of differentiation in today's business world. IDC has observed strong correlation between cloud adoption and data analytics. IDC's AWS IaaS User Survey in 2016 showed that data analytics applications were among the most common workloads deployed by organizations. IDC's 2016 Early Adopter DevOps Survey also showed that investments in analytics was one of the top investment areas positively impacted by DevOps adoption. Native Hybrid Cloud offers an optional add-on called Dell EMC Analytic Insights Module, combining cloud-native application development with self-service data analytics into a single cloud platform. It provides organizations with the ability to gather the right data through deep awareness, presenting one view across all discovered and ingested data. This eliminates data silos associated with large amounts of disparate data, saving significant time preparing data for analysis. Data analytics teams are 2017 IDC #US42493417 8
provided security and resource quotes by IT for role-based, self-service access to easily stand up independent workspaces and tools on-demand without disrupting the enterprise infrastructure. Designed to be open, these teams can choose from any of the analytics and visualization tools offered through Pivotal Cloud Foundry or from the expansive ecosystem beyond Analytic Insights Module. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry as a common foundation, insights surfaced by data analytics teams can be shared with application developers, enabling them to build data-driven applications for enhanced customer engagements. Intelligent applications generate more data, which can be integrated back into the data analytics process to enrich applications and provide even greater insights. The speed at which businesses can move through this virtuous cycle enhances their ability to adapt to changing market demands and give them a competitive advantage. Table 2 provides an overview of the features of Native Hybrid Cloud and the benefits they bring to stakeholders across the enterprise. TABLE 2 Native Hybrid Cloud and Analytics Insights Module Features and Benefits User Group Native Hybrid Cloud Benefits Developers Innovate faster by leveraging the industry-standard cloud-native platform and ecosystem Accelerate development velocity through access to Pivotal's Service Marketplace Move applications across clouds with zero code changes, increasing flexibility Empower developers by increasing collaboration with data analytics teams to deliver data-driven cloudnative apps with high business value Data analysts Gather more data with deep awareness from within and external to the enterprise Access a self-service workspace in minutes to rapidly generate actionable insights with high business value Share and publish data sets and analytics models in a single repository for collaboration across the organization Central IT teams Leverage existing skill sets managing VMware technology Broker IT services for developers and analytics teams empowering them with self-service to work independently Maintain central oversight and control with policy-based controls and integrated monitoring and reporting Save cost and effort with managed upgrades and support; "day zero" deployment Reduce operational risk with a fully engineered hybrid cloud platform supported from a single vendor Business owners Improve business agility by going from idea to product faster Leverage data insights to reveal new business opportunities and better engage with customers Source: IDC, 2017 2017 IDC #US42493417 9
Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud helps enterprises overcome the current challenges to cloud-native adoption by: Providing an engineered and integrated platform that is built on proven hardware and software components Saving enterprises thousands of engineering hours and resources needed to build and maintain this capability in-house Offering developers and IT operations the desired additional management tooling needed to manage the platform and applications deployed on it Providing access to hybrid cloud out of the box by bringing together access to public and private cloud resources through a common environment Delivering a consistent level of control and oversight to central IT over cloud-native efforts, reducing fragmentation of processes and policy Using Pivotal Cloud Foundry as the cloud-native environment an industry-standard platform that can be used across multiple cloud platforms and service providers Offering an add-on option for data analytics to deliver a self-service data analytics experience for revealing data insights for building intelligent cloud-native applications CHALLENGES/OPPORTUNITIES The business and technology trends growing maturity of cloud-native technologies, combined with business and competitive needs to drive DX within enterprises offer organizations an opportunity to fundamentally revise and redesign their information systems delivery models. Organizations that are able to effectively leverage cloud-native applications to build stronger customer engagement, drive better business results, and respond faster to changes are well positioned to respond to competitive threats. Organizations that build early competence in the cloud-native model and in delivering cloud-native applications will be able to accelerate progress of their DX initiatives and to differentiate themselves in the market through leveraging these capabilities. As organizations make progress in this direction, they should: Start the transformation with a specific business or business function while adopting a framework that can be applied across the enterprise Be proactive in cloud-native model adoption to avoid organic adoption within pockets of activities in the enterprise and a fragmented approach to cloud-native applications Actively incorporate cloud-native principles, including microservices architecture, for new application development wherever possible Partner with technology companies in the cloud-native ecosystem technology is progressing fast and it is challenging for most enterprises to build the necessary capabilities in-house CONCLUSION Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud enables IT organizations a fast and effective platform through which to offer a cloud-native environment to application teams across the enterprise. At the same time, it retains the consistency, control, and visibility needed for a central IT team to manage its infrastructure platform(s) effectively. Leveraging a pre-engineered solution like the Intel Xeon based Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud can save IT organizations thousands of hours in integration, engineering, and testing, allowing them to efficiently and quickly provide a cloud-native platform to internal teams, accelerate adoption of the cloud-native model, and lead the DX progress across the enterprise. 2017 IDC #US42493417 10
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