Private cloud architecture is your server "pet" or "goat"?

Http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/15530.html with cloud technology "> Large enterprises are increasing, especially private cloud technology. In a recent Theinfopro survey, 22% of companies were interested in cloud technology, and Two-thirds said their major resource spending was on private cloud development, and Carl Brooks said he was Tier1 research infrastructure and cloud computing analyst. As enterprises restructure the IT environment to create private clouds, the private cloud architecture is rudimentary. However, this is important for businesses to consider private cloud requirements and move forward.

"There is a natural roadmap that companies can follow," said Thomas Bittman, a vice president and a renowned analyst at Gartner, "whose virtualization is to be consolidated." And then they say, ' Now I have a pool of resources, I can be more flexible, ' so then they're automated. "Automation allows organizations to allocate virtual machines faster than physical servers." The third stage is to build a private cloud. Includes a self service interface to create the top of automation.

But companies themselves do not know the difference between these steps. Some companies say that the private cloud they are running is actually missing the architectural key components. Bill Corrington, head of cloud strategy at Stony Point Enterprises, said he wanted to know if his clients said they were talking about building a data center when they were building a private cloud, "is it possible to deliver highly resilient, scalable, pay-as-you-go services?" "he said. "If you are really going to deliver these features and services to the customer base within the enterprise, you need a management function to handle use case tracking, billing, access control, and ensuring that customers cannot see each other's data," Corrington said.

Jason Bloomberg, the president of Zapthink, agreed:

"When building a private cloud, on the one hand you are building a data center." You have to think about devices, power supplies and refrigeration, cabinets, servers, networks, and you have to consider virtualization software. But even then you don't have a cloud. You just have a virtualized hosting environment. ”

Bloomberg encourages companies to consider whether a virtualized hosting environment is effective in meeting business and technical requirements, or whether it is time to take the next step. "What is the cloud environment that is owned by the traditional virtualized hosting environment?" The answer is elasticity. Dynamic allocation and deployment of resources, service automation allocation and deployment, "Bloomberg said," On the private cloud, depends on the enterprise itself built. ”

Architecture Private Cloud considerations

"The first consideration is clearly what you actually want to achieve and the overall strategy of the infrastructure within the IT organization," Brooks says. This will vary according to the size of the enterprise. It may be as simple as picking a target, and choosing the nearest and cheapest service provider. When planning a private cloud architecture, consider whether it is for a single purpose and a single application, or as part of a larger IT strategy, Brooks says. Brooks also advises IT organizations to consider how large a private cloud is needed and what it might be used for. What technology stack do you want to put in, or build yourself?

Bloomberg encourages companies to think about whether they are seeking to operate a production environment or develop and test the environment. This answer will have an impact on scalability and bandwidth. You should consider elasticity. How dynamic is the environment needed? The private cloud is limited in elasticity because it comes from a traditional data center.

"It's resilient to the size of the datacenter," says Bloomberg.

Experts believe that most private cloud architectures are built to provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Bittman that these private clouds are based on virtual machines, and that the virtualization technologies that businesses choose often show the technology they use to move from virtualized data centers to private clouds.

Bittman explains that when choosing hypervisor to virtualize and consolidate servers, you can make a choice in a vacuum. But this choice will then affect the management and automation tools you choose. If you start with VMware, you may have a good choice to continue building a private cloud with VMware. But open source software is also a viable option.

Choose Cloud Automation and management software

"When building a private cloud service, consider that you are essentially architecting an interface for the user, completely abstracting everything around it," Bittman, who likens it to a restaurant menu. Customers see what dishes can be ordered, but they don't know how to prepare. The "private cloud" behind this scene is all automated. If someone clicks element A, assigning, deploying, optimizing, continuing management and upgrading, adding and shrinking, is automated. You need to automate the entire stack. This whole thing needs to be integrated, from top to bottom. ”

According to Bittman, Gartner breaks the stack down into five different parts: Access management, service management, service optimization, resource management, and resources. "We divide it into these five parts because manufacturers are entering the private cloud market, they have products and assertions are successful." But they're just part of it. Most vendors have an advantage in specific areas, but they are vulnerable in other areas, "Bittman said.

That's why companies need to be careful about private cloud requirements when choosing cloud automation and management tools.

"The main problem now is the immaturity of effectiveness, whether it's open source or business, and it's very new." When we say what we are automating, what we really want to do is to be able to press a button and all the automation is realized. You don't want most of the automation, "Bloomberg said." You don't want to push a button, and you get a bunch of stuff, and that's one thing you want to do throughout your career. ”

"You don't have to do anything in the clouds." Now that you have created the configuration effectively, can you automate everything? If there is a problem with the configuration, you can reassign and reassign it. Once you mess up, there's no way to manage, "Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg gives the analogy:

"In the past, we treated servers like pets. We name them and take care of their health. In the cloud, we can think of the server as a sheep, we count on the line, do not have to name, if a sick, directly remove the good, there is always a suitable application. ”

(Responsible editor: Schpeppen)