30 January 2014

Getting your head around the cloud means that all the disparate cultures of IT find a common language to share experience and really begin cooperation.

Management has decided that your company’s future lies in the cloud. So how does IT go about retraining? JAMES WALKER says a global cloud training strategy is urgently needed, and explains why the CloudEthernet Forum should play a key role in setting its agenda.

The ICT universe is like those astronomy photos of vast nebulae in collision: every now and then great systems converge and grow chaotic before settling down to some sort of new order.

In the 1990s it was ‘Bell-heads’ meet ‘Net-heads’. Here, one communications culture, built around message-dedicated physical connectivity, collided with a whole different culture that believed in chopping everything into tiny packets to be shaken through a sort of network mesh until it all came out the other end. In the 2000s it was WAN hits LAN – until they learnt to speak the common language of Ethernet. Now, with cloud computing, it’s networking meets data centre and?… CRUMP!

It has been said that networking people don’t understand IT, and data centre people don’t understand networking. At one level this statement is absurd and pretty insulting – of course the IT staff know plenty about networking and vice versa. But it does a highlight a difference which is rather like trusting your life to an experienced pilot versus someone who has read all the flight manuals. Each knows enough about the other to serve their own discipline, but that is not the same as the wisdom of experience and a comprehensive grasp of a highly complex system or environment.

When LAN met WAN, the former group had a simple answer for every issue: just give it more bandwidth. It took them time to really come to terms with WAN’s Classes of Service and traffic routing concerns.

These examples already reveal one important fact about cloud education: it requires more than just telling people what they need to know to fill the gaps in their understanding. The real education comes once the disparate cultures find a common language to share experience and really begin cooperation. How can this best be achieved? To begin with, let’s take a look at some of the pressures that are driving the demand for cloud training.

Changes in the IT department

As companies migrate to cloud-hosted services, a lot of existing maintenance, repair and upgrade services will also move to the cloud provider. At best, this will free-up support personnel to focus on more important IT projects. Of course, it could also make them redundant. But experienced IT staff are always in demand, so it will be wiser to give them more cloud training to meet the growing demand for cloud specialised consultants, developers, and architects. Indeed, as companies get a hunger for new cloud-hosted applications, the emphasis will shift from support to innovation – particularly in the area of mobile and handheld computing.

Lacking in definition: One of the problems of defining cloud computing is that the industry itself has yet to come up with a standardised definition. Such a standard will be a major leap for the sector and for training within it.

There is little doubt that cloud computing – by shifting from a capex business model to the pay-as-you-go opex model – is so much more attractive to today’s fast evolving business environment. But security is still a dominant concern for cloud novices, raising a significant demand for training, either to ensure that data stored on the cloud is protected and meets industry-specific regulations, or else simply to get a better understanding of the risks in order to inform better business decisions. There will also be a need for more education on private cloud creation, management and inter-working with public services.

Search for ‘cloud training’ on the internet and you’ll see there are already plenty of courses available to meet the above demands. But upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that they are very fragmented. Typically, it is the big vendors or user groups offering sound, practical training based around their preferred product portfolio. What is harder to find is a globally recognised cross-platform standard, a practical vocational equivalent of an MIT or Cambridge degree in Cloud Computing.

This again boils down to the fact that we do not yet have a common language – these different groups do not even have consensus on what they mean by the term ‘cloud’. We are still at that peak in the ‘hype cycle’ where you can be pretty sure that someone, somewhere will be offering expensive weekend courses on “Cloud Consciousness” or “Find your Inner Cloud”.

James Walker, President, CloudEthernet Forum

“Writing and creating definitions will build the dictionary of terms needed to ensure that cloud training courses grow beyond niche skillsets and become recognised for qualifications with universal value.”

A model for re-education

So far, all this is looking rather negative. But we did find one recent example where a similar collision of cultures was managed and resolved in reasonable time to the benefit of the whole industry – and even to the greater benefit of the global business and public service communities. Taking the WAN meets LAN collision, ‘Ethernet’ became the common language and is still bringing these two cultures into cooperation. This didn’t happen by chance, but rather because the MetroEthernet Forum (MEF) played a very active role in promoting Carrier Ethernet. It is worth revisiting how this was achieved.

The MEF began with a group of Ethernet vendors who saw an opportunity to extend Ethernet from the LAN into the metro space, with the benefits of simpler, unified connectivity. Their first step was to cooperate, bringing competing companies together to decide common standards so that a ‘Metro Ethernet’ marketplace could develop rather than a scattering of incompatible metro solutions.

The second step was a recognition that the concept had far greater potential beyond the metro space, and the Carrier Ethernet brand was launched as a global connectivity solution. The lesson here was the realisation that this couldn’t happen without the collaboration of carriers and service providers. So the MEF launched a major recruitment drive to get commitment from a broader spectrum of WAN stakeholders.

The Carrier Ethernet brand provided the common language between the LAN and WAN communities – so the real learning was now taking place, thanks largely to the MEF’s globally recognised definitions and specifications.

The third step was to speak to potential customers and reassure them that they could safely adopt these new services (and at a time when uncertain economic conditions were making the industry highly risk-averse). Certification programmes were launched for equipment and for services, a guarantee that all this would at least ‘do what it says on the tin’. The resulting uptake became the telecommunications success story of the decade. By 2012, Carrier Ethernet sales had outstripped the sum total of all legacy WAN technologies combined.

This has been followed by further certification: the MEF Carrier Ethernet Certified Professional (MEF-CECP) programme that offers a basic Carrier Ethernet education plus an examination and a certificate of acceptance.

So the question is this: how relevant is this process to today’s convergence of IT and networking in the cloud? Should the CloudEthernet Forum (CEF) plan a similar path to promote cloud services through education and standardisation? After all, although the MEF and CEF have some overlap in terms of membership, the two forums do have different members and serve quite different groups: network oriented staff as opposed to data centre, cloud and application-oriented staff.

Is this the way for the cloud?

The first point of similarity is that Carrier Ethernet and the cloud both incorporate a collision between cultures of the sort already described. And both create a very fast-growing market – even more so in the case of cloud services. Like the collision of giant nebulae, such explosive market growth could easily lead to a Tower of Babel scenario of competing, incompatible solutions and market fragmentation. So the first two steps described above could be even more urgent for the CEF: the need for cooperation between potential competitors to develop a common language between the IT and networking worlds, and a corresponding need for commitment from every type of cloud stakeholder to make sure the common standards develop truly universal appeal, across both network and applications.

Writing and creating definitions will build the dictionary of terms needed to ensure that cloud training courses grow beyond niche skillsets and become recognised for qualifications with universal value. It also gets the IT and networking stakeholders talking and cooperating faster for a smoother transition into cloud services. Certification helps consolidate this common language by giving it a tangible form in a wider business community, guaranteeing interoperability of defined services across multiple suppliers.

That will naturally lead to the creation of a professional training programme: a course of training, an exam, and globally recognised certification for a certain level of expertise in cloud computing and services. One lesson from the MEF experience is that – in the face of explosive market growth – the initial courses are likely to be more business than technology focused.

In other words, it would be foolish to begin the programme by competing with the many available proprietary cloud technology training courses, because the technology is still very fluid and common ground is yet to be established. What is first needed is the common language and level of technical understanding to be able to speak to the marketplace and offer sound advice on cloud choices and decisions. So any initial CEF professional training and certification will be targeting the sales community. More specific technical training can follow as common technical standards emerge.

Another lesson the CEF can learn from the MEF’s experience is that clearer labelling is needed to reflect the ways its solutions evolve. The MEF specified “Carrier Ethernet” but the technology kept evolving as new definitions were laid down. Later features, such as multiple Classes of Service, were not available for the early adopters and so the Carrier Ethernet market was becoming less clear about ‘what it says on the tin’. In retrospect, it adopted the IT version labelling convention and announced “CE 2.0” to distinguish today’s state-of-the-art Carrier Ethernet from retrospectively labelled earlier standards as “CE 1.0.”

To avoid such confusion, you will hear the term “CloudEthernet 1.0” being used to describe the initial Ethernet standards for the cloud, while the common language is being developed.

What now?

So how does IT go about retraining given management’s decision that the company’s future lies in the clouds? Almost certainly there will be a need for some specific technical training either from your main networking and data centre vendors, or from a training body targeting their customers. However, we have already agreed that it is important for any large organisation not to lose sight of the more important long-term need to get IT and networking talking a common cloud language.

Until the CEF launches its own vendor-neutral certification programme, there’s a lot to be said for any major stakeholder becoming directly involved with our work (which is currently focused on CloudEthernet 1.0 and its principal use cases), agreeing a shared set of architectural principles, and building a common and consistent dictionary of terms.

The main business concerns about cloud migration are not about technical detail so much as general issues around , security, loss of control, accountability, or privacy leakages. Addressing such broad issues requires a similarly broad understanding.

So again, the recommendation is first to encourage as many people as possible to gain a wider understanding of cloud computing and how networking, applications, virtualisation and hardware all must work in harmony to deliver a seamless cloud service. Remember too, that current IT networks include many legacy systems that are not compatible with cloud deployments.

Building a firm foundation for a global cloud future

Training is essential for any organisation’s successful deployment of cloud-based solutions, and that knowledge has to be multi-disciplinary. I believe that the CEF must play a leading role in defining a standards-based platform to support interoperability of the different layers and sub-systems manufactured by different vendors, with elements that may be geographically distributed and which can belong to different cloud environments (public, private or hybrid).

In addition, a carefully designed professional training and certification programme – with an initial emphasis on building a common language and crossdiscipline understanding – will help build a group of recognised experts across the industry. Only then will we have the shared knowledge, experience and skillsets to increase efficiency and speed deployment of CloudEthernet, and so provide a firm foundation for a global cloud future.

This article is a summary of the notes taken during a meeting with CEF members to discuss the issues surrounding cloud training. The main contributors were: Phil Tilley, senior director of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP portfolio strategy; Dan Romascanu, director of external standards for Avaya; Dr Hongwen Zhang, president and CEO of Wedge Networks; and Henry Bohannon, senior director and head of Ethernet product management at Tata Communications. My apologies for not ascribing individual contributions.