Santa Clara based, Ensim Corporation, since 1998, has been a provider of automation solutions through business services, applications and private, public and hybrid cloud enabled infrastructure.

Cloud computing has caused a dramatic shift in the way products and services are delivered and consumed. It has become increasingly imperative for service providers and enterprises – which are beginning to act more like internal service providers - to be able to rapidly put out, deliver and charge for offers via the cloud to enable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and to provide users with self-service abilities. A basic IaaS model involves offering virtual machines (VMs) and other supporting resources that are hosted in the cloud and run by hypervisors such as OpenStack, Microsoft, VMware, Xen and others. The providers generally charge for IaaS services based on the amount of resources consumed. Providers have a major revenue opportunity as more and more customers look to them to offer and support IaaS, as they can guarantee more privacy than the large public cloud players with only one kind of hosting overlay.

Many providers are slow to adopt IaaS

Despite the benefits, many small-level providers have been slow to embrace the IaaS hosting model.

The reluctance to move into the IaaS market stems largely from the front and back end complexity required to create IaaS offerings, launch services with automation, and accurately track and bill for use. For a company to shift from a traditional business model to a model that allows its infrastructure offerings to be delivered as a service via the cloud requires a major overhaul of its existing processes, as well as the technology that supports those processes.

Providers are unsure of the technology platforms that they would need to effectively support VM hosting in the cloud. Instead, the IaaS market has typically been dominated by a few major public cloud players that have the resources to support all the associated billing and operating system complexities.

Fortunately, evolving technologies are allowing smaller providers to break in to this lucrative market and offer complete, fully automated solutions to quickly launch IaaS offerings while simply tying into their back office systems. However, providers need to choose the right technology solutions to take the complexity out while also making the process simpler to the end-user and more appealing to IT admins.

An imperative characteristic in a technology solution is that it should give users self-service abilities via an intuitive and easy-to-use control panel. But the key to successfully supporting IaaS is that these solutions also need to be able to handle the advanced tasks required to take it from a basic control panel to a full automation, orchestration and management platform. This includes efficiently supporting all the complex front and back end processes necessary to rapidly roll out flexible offerings – from clearly defining offerings through establishing the right pricing models, accurately tracking consumption– even at the most granular level and billing customers accordingly.

Flexible service and application connectors are needed to enable all of the automation functionality of the various hypervisor platforms to be fully leveraged for fine grain provisioning and management to control any application, service, and infrastructure component connected through standard web service APIs whether multi-tenant or single tenant, on premise or in the cloud.

The complete IaaS Automation Suite

The complete automation suite needed to launch IaaS is made of three layers:

1.Hypervisor/virtualization layer - This is the first step in the automation process. Public cloud vendors like Amazon and Azure use their proprietary technologies. General purpose hypervisors are developed by VMWare, Microsoft (HyperV) and OpenStack (Xen).

2. Network routing - Once the VMs are spun, the critical next step is to complete network routing rules to make those VMs reachable across the internet. From a technology perspective, this layer sits under the hypervisor. There are many networking vendors like Cisco, Juniper, CheckPoint, F5 and therefore there is no standard way to automate this layer. Large public cloud providers like Amazon, Rack Space, Azure and others have built custom solutions for automation but for smaller vendors this is still a challenge.

3. Application deployment and license monitoring - Technically this layer sits on top of everything although it is initiated at the end. Once the VMs are made available across the internet, this step involves deploying operating systems and applications and monitoring their license usage for chargeback. A challenge at this layer is, again, that there really is no universal standard for an accurate tool to monitor application licenses; automation is still necessary.

For providers to succeed in hosting virtual machines in the cloud, they need an IaaS management platform that does end-to-end automation across all three layers from a single portal, so there are no manual steps necessary for the service provider to perform.