Telemetry (Ceilometer) A single point of contact for billing and metering systems across current and future OpenStack components.
Orchestration (Heat) A template-based system for orchestrating multiple composite cloud applications.
Summary 85
Another argument is cloud interoperability, which is how separate clouds from different organizations can interact with each other to form larger clouds and a bigger ecosystem for collaboration. The question here is whether these organizations would really need or at all want to have this shared ecosystem. We imagine that would be quite bad for business if the organizations in question are profit-oriented ones. It might work for educational and research organizations, but these types of entities are historically known to embrace open- source solutions, so they would already be in the position to share and merge because most likely they will already be using a form of OpenStack. Profit-oriented organizations will be hard-pressed to collaborate with each other, and even when they want to collaborate with educational institutions and research organizations, they can simply create an interface between the two clouds. So this is another nonissue.
In the end, it all boils down to choice and adoption. Those companies that choose open source will see a wide adoption in the industry, and those companies that choose proprietary want none of that openness in the first place. So the final factor in the battle between open source and proprietary is simply the needs and desires of the organization. All organizations will think twice and really plan their move to the cloud, and their choice, open source or proprietary, will be based on their business needs and their stance regarding their future use of that infrastructure. It is not a battle of which is better; it’s simply choice. If what an orga- nization needs can’t be provided by the open-source option, the proprietary infrastructure is best for them.
Summary
With technology moving quickly for business and consumer applications, it is becoming more evident that cloud computing is the direction the industry needs to take. But it must be noted that the cloud is a concept, or rather an application of a concept on distribution and usage of computing resources, and is not an entirely new and separate technology in need of its own unique constructs and infrastructure. Simply put, cloud computing is a bet- ter way of using finite resources. What that means is that it is not running on entirely dif- ferent hardware compared to traditional on-premises enterprise computing; it’s merely an evolution of it.
As for the data center that runs cloud or traditional IT, it can be interchangeable depending on the need. But the importance of good design cannot be stressed enough. We are talking about millions of dollars in cost, so efficiency and reliability should always be at the core of data center design no matter the purpose, be it cloud or on-premises.
Chapter Essentials
Key Differences between Traditional and Cloud-Based Hardware The key difference here is configuration. What type of hardware devices and how they are connected to each other are essentially what makes the hardware infrastructure for these two concepts different.
The cloud data center is designed to cater to thousands of users at once and will be config- ured for scalability, which means homogeneous hardware; this makes maintenance easier considering the scale of the facilities. Traditional on-premises data centers are designed to cater only to a single organization and its constituents, meaning that it is at a smaller scale, and the hardware configuration will vary depending on the requirements of the enterprise applications being supported. But both types of data center will make use of the same basic hardware, i.e., the same types of CPU, RAM, storage disks, and networking equipment like switches and hubs.
Chapter
4 Cloud Management
TOPICS COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER INCLUDE:
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✓ Network and IP planning/documentation
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✓ Configuration standardization and documentation
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✓ Change management best practices
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✓ Configuration management
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✓ Capacity management
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✓ Systems life cycle management
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✓ Maintenance windows
scratching their heads at the sheer enormity of the task that is cloud management.
Thankfully there are a lot of choices for services and applications that are meant to make things simpler and more streamlined, allowing administrators to simply sit back and let the system monitor the cloud infrastructure with minimum intervention required.
Cloud management does not start with the administration portion after deployment;
it starts during the planning phase. All of the aspects of the cloud must be well thought out from a management perspective, from the proper operation of computing resources, updates, and upgrades to customer service and legal support.
Management is especially critical in enterprises where agility and efficiency are the main drivers because cloud technology is essential and key to addressing and achieving business objectives. This is because cloud computing is now considered a definite way to significantly drive business process efficiency, innovation, and differentiation of selling points. Proper management is therefore a pivotal requirement to achieve these benefits.
With today’s highly competitive and connected world, customers are more vocal about their opinions than ever, leading companies to constantly innovate and deliver new ideas and services in order to stay in the game or ahead of the competition. In the past, enterprise IT has often been the bottleneck. It has greatly affected a company’s agility because developers and QA engineers had to wait in line for IT administrators to go through their queue before development and testing platforms could be provisioned for them.
To address these concerns, most enterprises have turned to cloud computing and exploring its benefits in their own data centers using private clouds. For fast on-demand access and pro- visioning, smart resource allocation and scheduling, resource monitoring, and environment control, what we know as traditional IT must abandon its reactive ways, simply waiting for requests and orders, and be more predictive and proactive to the needs of the organization.
This is especially true when it comes to data center and computing resource management.
Understanding Cloud Management Platforms
Cloud technology is proliferating at a high rate of speed, and a lot of organizations are diving into cloud computing because of the benefits. Most enterprises are at the very least implement- ing some type of on-premise private cloud, while a growing number are starting to use public
Understanding Cloud Management Platforms 89
cloud platforms from multiple vendors. Most organizations will probably be requiring services from multiple vendors simply because most vendors specialize in some service or another in order to differentiate themselves from each other. So when an enterprise needs Software as a Service (SaaS) technology for certain applications and also a platform for development, chances are they would need two separate providers for both services. This creates unnecessary com- plexity because those two cloud services are not meant to work with each other, even though in principle they should. This is a challenge for basic tasks like provisioning, orchestration, governance, and overall management. The situation in the industry right now is that there are a bunch of cloud computing silos being built separately by different providers. Most of them are innovative and will be needed by an enterprise or two. But the problem is that they are not made to coexist, and that’s what the OpenStack open-source project aims to solve. For now, however, we have this fragmentation and we are left with a multi-cloud management challenge.
What we need is an innovative solution that is built on a layer above these standard separate silos, cloud platforms, or end points that have been implemented across the enterprise, a solution that can act as an abstraction layer so that you do not have to conform to the nuances of each cloud plat- form . That solution is the cloud management platform .
Management platforms are integrated products made up of several applications and tools that provide monitoring and management of private, public, and hybrid cloud envi- ronments. To be called a management platform, a product must at least integrate interfaces for self-service provisioning of computing resources like server and storage images and virtual machines, enable billing and metering, and provide workload and performance optimization to some extent. More advanced solutions may offer extended functional- ities like better micromanagement and automation of computing resources and may have facilities to integrate with other cloud environments for collaborative work. It may also support advanced monitoring akin to that of the tools used by the service providers them- selves to monitor and micromanage certain aspects of the infrastructure and environment.
Figure 4.1 shows a basic overview of how a management platform can connect different implementations of cloud environments.
Cloud management platforms enable the deployment and management of enterprise- class services and applications across all cloud types. They serve to bridge different cloud platforms and act as a central focal point and management center to make different clouds from different vendors play nice with each other, to an extent. This kind of system really helps in solving the vendor lock-in debate between proprietary and open-source cloud plat- forms. It may not be a total answer and solution to the problem, but at least it helps some- what. Management platforms are available as SaaS or as stand-alone on-premise software that enables you to control your cloud from within your own data center.
Management platforms then provide automation using a set of rules and policies as a blueprint to minimize the need for users and developers to know how to do what needs to be done for each separate cloud platform out there. They simply a set of tools and capabilities that the user can harness to be able to perform all cloud computing functions effectively and consistently across the multi-cloud environment. So instead of multiple silos or end points, the user is presented with a single plain field, minimizing the complexity to a bottom layer.
F I G U R E 4 .1 Cloud management platform
Cloud Service A
Private Cloud Cloud Service B
Cloud Management
Platform