The cloud vending machine approach to IT services delivery offers efficiencies and cost savings that stretch tax dollars and return immediate benefits to state residents, Waters explains.
"This is part of a vision to deliver greater value to our citizens that the governor has actively backed and that we are now delivering," he says. "Our user-base vision is that the cloud-based services that we are now delivering to state agencies will over time be extended to county and even city agencies. To do this, we will ultimately realign our infrastructure into a four-cloud, networked configuration run from two data centers in Cheyenne. The beauty of the design is that it actually shrinks the footprints of the data centers. One complete cloud configuration occupies only eight racks in a data center. This allows us to work with our existing data centers, and to avoid the effort and expense of constructing new data centers. It is part of the governor's vision to improve the lives of our citizens."
Wyoming's cloud vending machine also tackles the issue of how to charge back for the cloud servers that data centers vend. "Like a vending machine, the cloud is entirely self-service," explains Waters. "So a user goes to a portal and tells the portal what he needs. The portal configures the necessary server, storage and network resources, and then comes back to the user and says, 'This is what you've asked for.' The user approves the configuration, and the configuration is deployed. Chargebacks are based on these requests, and at the end of each month the user receives a bill."
Waters estimates that the bill end users receive is "about half" of what they could expect to pay from a commercial service--which also should make Wyoming tax payers happy. "At the end of each month, along with their billing, users receive a list of the resources that are allocated to them," he says. "It is our way of telling them, 'This is what you've got,' so they can decide what they want to keep and what they want to de-allocate." Wyoming IT also makes courtesy calls to end users to alert them to resources that they ordered that aren't being used. The process reduces resource waste and saves money.
"The most popular use today for the vending machine cloud is for IT application development, testing and staging," says Waters. "Legislation this past spring created an Enterprise Technology Services agency, into which we will be consolidating distributed IT departments for greater efficiency."
Now that the cloud vending machine has been deployed, Waters has had time to reflect on the project. "The surprises in the project that we did not anticipate were mostly small," he says. "One thing that we had not anticipated was the need to change our network infrastructure. Our private cloud uses network-attached SAN, and we had to reconfigure for that, along with adding fast IOPS switches and SCSI fiber."
The self-service portal was also a challenge. "We had done a good job learning about the ergonomics that users wanted in the development of the portal, but when we launched an IT consolidation initiative that accompanied our deployment of the cloud, we found we had to do a lot of marketing to 'sell' the idea of a consolidated enterprise IT agency because of the sense of ownership individual departments had for their 'own' IT," says Waters.
Going forward, the plan is to give users more control over their resources in the cloud. "We plan to privatize the cloud experience in our multitenant environment to where each tenant can exercise ownership over its area by controlling its own virtual firewall," says Waters.
What words of wisdom does Waters have for others considering private cloud implementations?
"Don't give up when the chips are down," he says. "Sometimes you have to go out on your own to find the right solution. Then once you find it, you have to get your staff to believe that they can do a private cloud project. For us, this was a yearlong journey--but we never gave up."
