Accelerating service delivery with cloud mirroring and service catalogs

Using catalogs to easily store and reuse virtual components

In cloud computing, delivering infrastructure, a service solution, involves 3 main functional aspects:

Computational power to implement computing or virtual machine functions.

Storage capabilities facilitate the storage of data with compute nodes (as direct or indirect storage available to these nodes).

The network capability realizes the connection between the compute node and the storage node.

This article explores the basics of an important concept in computing-using mirrors and service catalogs in a cloud environment.

Mirrors and Services Directory: Basics

It is well known that using and reusing virtual units in a cloud computing environment accelerates machine deployment and reduces the risk of introducing human errors into deployment. Do you know that you can use mirrors and service catalogs as tools to further simplify this process, so that users can easily save components and instantiate them infinitely many times? Cloud computing platforms typically provide a mirrored, paid-for directory feature, which makes it easy and cost-effective to save and deploy mirrors from a variety of vendors or developers in your organization.

3 types of directories are used in the cloud computing environment: private, public, and service. Let's get to know them all.

Private Directory

A Private Directory is a collection of virtual mirrors that can only be seen in a personal cloud account. The private directory is initially an empty container, which is then kept in the mirror created by the account owner. These directories are associated with a company or organization, but are typically accessed by multiple users.

A private mirror is a virtual machine instance that is saved as a persistent state. These mirrors are only visible to the account owner who initiated the virtual machine save. Private image saving usually results in a mirror that can be instantiated at a larger instance scale than was originally created, increasing their usefulness to the owner. When you initiate a save, the private mirror is reduced and only the data stored in the mirror is saved, not the entire disk that is allocated at the time of the configuration.

For example, if the operating system data does not change before the mirror is saved, and no additional information is added, the 120GB disk used for the virtual mirror may end up storing only 4-6GB private mirror data.

In a cloud environment, when reassigned, information that is automatically replaced in a private mirror is erased, including various network-related information and authentication credentials. These elements are injected again at configuration time.

The private mirroring feature makes it easy for users to create "gold" mirrors (to be used as mirrors of templates) and reusable development mirrors, a useful mechanism for ensuring deployment consistency and repeatability.

Public directory

The public directory contains mirrors that are available to all cloud accounts in a specific datacenter. For example, each IBM smartcloud Enterprise Data Center has a unique public mirror directory that can be used by accounts within the facility.

The common directory employs a cloud-specific concept that aggregates mirrors from a variety of accounts, allowing each account to ration instances from that directory.

A public mirror is a private mirror with elevated privileges that makes it available for use in a public directory. By elevating a private image to a public directory, vendors can provide software through pre-installed and preconfigured mirrors cloud users. Many software vendors use the Public image catalog as a simple and easy delivery model for delivering products to the marketplace.

Many of IBM's software offerings are provided in public mirrors that allow users to use these mirrors as an underlying instance to create value-added services. IBM DB2, Informix, Lotus Domino, Process Center, and other software applications are now available as public mirrors and can be deployed quickly across a variety of instances.

In the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise environment, private mirrors must be nominated and passed some IBM SmartCloud integrity checks to be included in the public directory.

Figure 1. To elevate a mirror to a public directory

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