cloud management
Moving to the Cloud: Managing your Environment
Digg
Reddit
Delicious
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedInThis post is part of a series examining the issues involved when moving applications between internal data centers and public clouds.
One of the advantages of cloud computing is that someone else is managing the infrastructure – including the servers, network devices and storage systems, not to mention the data center power conditioning, cooling and fire suppression equipment. One of the costs of offloading this infrastructure is that the cloud becomes something different and separate from your data center. In most deployments today, the cloud is almost completely isolated from your data center, and this often requires changes in how you manage and interact with your applications.
So what does “management” mean in this context? I look at it in terms of provisioning resources and managing the infrastructure, operating systems and applications. Over the years a remarkable set of tools and processes has been developed to handle these tasks in the data center, and the challenge now is how you integrate all this investment with the new cloud deployments.
For provisioning, the cloud has a model similar to a data center virtualized environment, in that you can provision virtual resources from a pool of physical resources. However, the definition of these resources is dictated by the cloud provider, which means you have to adjust your processes to account for the capabilities and limitations imposed by the cloud, specifically CPU, memory and storage resources. To be successful in the cloud, you need to match the resources required for your application to the capabilities of the cloud (i.e., pick enough CPU/memory/etc. to meet your application’s requirements while balancing the costs of the cloud resources). If you already have a provisioning system, you need to expand and modify it to account for the cloud (e.g., add parameters to account for cloud capabilities, build connectors to the cloud API, tie into the cloud account mechanism, etc.). If you don’t have a system in place, you need to build a new process to access the cloud resources. The overriding issue for either approach is that there are no standards yet for cloud provisioning, so the work you do to tie into a cloud provider is not portable to another cloud. The promise of cloud products which offer multi-cloud capabilities is that they can connect you to different clouds using a common set of interfaces.
Managing your cloud infrastructure can be a lot of work. You need to integrate with an architecture defined by the cloud provider, using its specific primitives for working with cloud components. This requires tying into the cloud APIs for configuring IP addresses, subnets and firewalls, as well as data service functions for your storage. Because control of these functions is based on the cloud provider’s infrastructure and services, you also have to modify your internal processes and control systems to integrate with the cloud infrastructure management.
Even managing your operating systems as part of a cloud deployment presents challenges. Many cloud services provide “base servers” or templates that contain a simple distribution or OS, which are then used to build up your specific server/OS/application. This approach works well when the provider has the exact base server you want to start from, and you have a process in place to build from a running server. The challenge is that when you build up a server based on a gold image, it may: a) not match the base cloud OS version, b) be built from a non-running or base OS versus a fully-running OS (as required by most clouds), and c) use internal resources (boot servers, internal repositories, etc.) that are not available in the cloud. From a maintenance perspective, many organizations use central controls for updates (like WSUS for windows), and these services depend on access to data center networks and services. Since public clouds are running external to your data center, these services either won’t work, or need to be altered to run the hybrid environment.
Finally, the cloud creates additional complexity for managing applications. You almost always need to modify applications to accommodate cloud differences (virtual environment, networks and storage), which means that the applications in the cloud diverge from the “original” or base applications in your data center. You may also use third-party tools to help with integration into the cloud (such as VPN software, integration scripts, encryption software, etc.), which then need to be maintained. Each of these software elements has it its own lifecycle and update management, most of which apply to every image deployed into the cloud.
The management problems introduced by including the cloud in your infrastructure all have their source in the same issue – the cloud is something separate and different from your data center. This separation becomes clear when you consider the integration and management issues that span everything from provisioning to reengineering your applications to changes in lifecycle management. At CloudSwitch we’re streamlining and automating cloud management to eliminate most of these issues, and bridge the separation between the cloud and your data center.
Next: Moving to the Cloud: Series Wrap-Up
Dynamic Cloud Fitting - The Future in Automated Cloud Management
The cloud computing landscape is evolving rapidly, with more and more players introducing cloud products and services of all kinds. Most recently we’ve seen the announcements by VMware partners including Terremark, BlueLock and others, as well as the introduction of Rackspace’s Cloud Servers. EMC is planning to offer a compute cloud in addition to its existing Atmos storage cloud. As the proliferation of offerings continues to accelerate, IT managers have questions about how to proceed: How can you evaluate the range of potential cloud offerings to find the right match? How do you route an application or workload to a target cloud and make sure that it works? How do you integrate it with other applications running back in the data center?
Cloud Brokers
As Gartner Group points out, getting the most out of the cloud will ultimately require the assistance of a knowledgeable and reliable expert: the cloud service broker. Cloud blogger John Willis feels strongly as well about the importance of this emerging category. Even within a single cloud, deploying an application requires learning the provider’s operating environment, management tools and business terms and conditions. Doing this for every cloud provider you may wish to utilize is likely to prove daunting and not cost-effective. In a cloud environment characterized by multiple providers, each with its own service terms, operating platforms, management systems, security levels and disaster recovery approaches, the specialized expertise and value-add of a cloud service broker will help IT managers find the right cloud offering, deploy their application in the cloud and manage it properly.
Effective cloud management will not only require technical expertise but also the business savvy and leverage necessary to negotiate the best deals and relationships between cloud consumers and cloud providers. This specialized knowledge, as well as access to the latest cloud management tools and services, will make the cloud broker a strategic partner for companies that want to use the cloud (broadly defined) to full advantage — especially as a wave of new cloud services come to market and the environment becomes still more heterogeneous.
Going Dynamic
Within the next few years, the cloud will become a much more dynamic environment, with the cloud broker playing a leading role. In the early adoption phase, enterprises will still want to “fit” their computing needs to a cloud manually. But over time, at least some cloud applications will be managed using an automated, rules-based approach, both for initial deployment and also for periodically reviewing performance and evaluating alternatives. For example, when the cost of running an application reaches a certain threshold, other cloud options will be evaluated automatically. If a more attractive offering meets established policies, the changeover can occur in real time.
The benefits of this dynamic cloud fitting will soon become apparent, whereby cloud service brokers use specialized tools to identify the most appropriate cloud resource, and then map the requirements of an enterprise application to it. Cloud service brokers will be able to automatically route data, applications and infrastructure needs based on key criteria such as price, location, latency needs, SLA level, supported operating systems, cloud scalability, backup/disaster recovery capabilities and regulatory requirements. IT managers will be able to run applications where they truly belong, while the broker takes care of the underlying details that make the cloud so compelling.
RSS Feed