Key Capabilities required for Cloud Service Management

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My previous blog described the core Service Management functions required to deliver cloud as a service.  This blog expands that description by highlighting the key tool, process and organisation capabilities required to enable those functions.  Without these capabilities an IT department will not be able to effectively or efficiently operate a cloud service in a satisfactory manner, preventing it from delighting its customers and attending to the needs of the business.

From my experience, the majority of senior stakeholders, such as the “Heads of,” are predominately more concerned with the impact on their organisation.  So I’ll start with the organisation capability required for the Fulfillment and Offering Management Service Components I described in the last blog.

The nirvana is to have all processes automated with minimal human intervention.  In reality the infrastructure Fulfillment function is a mix of both manually executed and automated tasks, which require maintaining.

The Platform Provision Manager role oversees the fulfillment of environment orders requested by the customer and carried-out by the Provisioning Team.  The Provisioning Team is a multi-disciplined technology team responsible for the end-to-end provisioning and environment build assurance procedures.  They will essentially be responsible for the orchestration, manual or automated, of the infrastructure provisioned and its quality.

Working hand in hand are the Service Capacity Manager and Resource Capacity Analyst.  Without going into too much detail these roles are ultimately responsible for marrying-up demand for environment orders with the supply of infrastructure resources.

Also working behind the scenes are the Pricer and Financial Administrator.  The Pricer is a commercial role who maintains the cost model and specifies the offering price for each type of resource unit offered.  Depending on how sophisticated the charge back process is the Financial Administrator will either measure or validate consumption in preparation to bill the customer.

A Service Catalogue Administrator will maintain the catalogue used by the customer to select the IaaS offerings; in this context build images or server patterns.  These will be owned by the Pattern Owner who will be part of a Research & Development function, which will develop the IaaS offerings and technical capability.

Finally, there are the Service Demand and Service Managers who ensure services are relevant to the customer’s needs and meet the agreed levels of service and availability.

These roles will follow several processes and procedures.  The Fulfillment workflow consists of three primary processes which enable the end-to-end provisioning lifecycle.  This starts with a self-service request process integrated with an automated environment build and assurance process and finishes with a metering and billing process.  Underpinning this is a service demand forecast & capacity planning process.  The customer will usually have to follow an internal process to validate their intended environment requirements and gain financial approval before proceeding.

It’s exactly like how McDonalds is now.  The customer places their own order from the online menu of set meals, which is sent to the kitchen for preparation using their standard recipes and pay only for what is ordered.  Underpinning that someone is estimating how many buns they need next week based on the amount of happy meals consumed last week.  And any teenagers need to ask their parents for money before they order.  No matter what you think of the food, the service works consistently.

With regards to the Offering Management component it needs procedures in place to maintain the service catalogue, develop new and maintain existing offerings (images and patterns) and report on service demand and delivery performance.  To continue with the McDonalds analogy; updating the menu, developing new recipes to meet changing trends and working out what the best and worst sellers are.  I’m not suggesting the next IT manager should come from McDonalds, but service delivery is their key competency and even take away food is now starting to be made in the cloud (dark kitchens).

Enabling these processes to be used by the above roles are the tools.  The first tool you need is a self-service request tool, which is preferably combined with the Service Catalogue.  These are usually modules available in a service management workflow tool such as ServiceNow (other tool brands are available).  Ideally, the request tool would be interfaced with the orchestration tool to automatically prompt the provision and decommission of infrastructure.  This provision activity is well below the water line and is a dark art which magically provides infrastructure on-demand.  In practice, truly automated provisioning relies on a core orchestration tool which kicks off multiple scripts to build and deploy standard image templates and patterns.  All of which need tools to develop, maintain and store.  If you want to avoid a disjoined operation further integration is needed with a capacity management database and a resource usage and account tool required for workload placement and billing.  These may also rely on information held in the CMDB.  Finally, the Service Manager will need a standard set of report queries to produce the management information needed to get a handle on service performance.

It doesn’t stop here.  Tool vendors have noticed there is an opportunity to simply the complex tooling required to manage cloud services, especially for hybrid and multi, and have developed dedicated cloud management platform tools (IBM’s Multi-Could Market Place for instance).  These vary in functionality but seek to combine many of the tool functionality mentioned earlier into a single front end, albeit with several interfaces to other back end-tools.

To make the IaaS user experience slick requires a material amount of sophisticated capability.  Depending on the organisation, the level of existing capability will vary.  An IT department may already have capability in place that can either be applied or enhanced but in many cases, particularly to enable new functionality, the IT department may have to internally develop or buy-in capability, especially tooling.  And then there’s making it work together like a well-oiled machine.

This is were GTS Service Management Consultants can help.  We have the expertise and experience to help define and implement the organisation, processes and tools required to enable IT Operations manage cloud services.  For more information contact Dr Lloyd I Dale, Associate Partner IBM, via lloyd_dale@uk.ibm.com.