Using the American Thanksgiving dinner analogy to describe cloud computing

Ask a technician What is cloud computing, and what you most likely get is a boilerplate answer that includes words such as "flexibility", "agility", "Broadband access", "dynamic", "measurable". For most people, however, these definitions do not help them understand what role cloud computing can play in their IT environment. It is for this reason that I developed a method of analogy with the American Thanksgiving dinner to help introduce the concept of cloud computing. So far, this approach has worked so well that it allows us to visualize what we can do with the cloud in our communication discussions with our customers, and how cloud computing differs from what it currently does.

Let's start with the chicken chop. Every year, you invite 10 relatives and friends to attend Thanksgiving dinner. Since you invite every year the same 10 relatives and friends, so after a few years, you have learned how to accurately cut a 18-pound turkey, and let everyone get enough turkey slices. In addition, you also know how many white turkey meat and how many dark turkey meat. In addition, since you invite each year the same 10 relatives and friends, you also know that everyone likes the part of the Turkey. The result is that most people are happy and you have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner. The reason I say "most" is that some people reluctantly accept slices of turkey they don't like, but they don't complain and give anything.

This is almost the epitome of the services currently provided by IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service infrastructure, or services). It provides a set of resources (like turkeys) that are split into small, medium, large, and different sizes of virtual machines. They have little deviation from the template. You can pick a certain amount of CPU, memory and bandwidth. Cutting resource pools in this way means that the operation can be more convenient to manage the cloud environment, to ensure that everyone can get enough "turkey", which can make customers satisfied. Based on this, the Operation dimension can conveniently monitor the capacity of resource pool and develop its extension rules. In addition, resource pooling with a fixed incremental expansion also makes purchasing easier.

The above describes the first step toward delivering cloud computing, a good step, but not cloud computing; it's just virtualization. Further, IT organizations typically use this approach to model their physical data centers as a virtual entity. So let's continue using the analogy of Thanksgiving dinner to see what happens when we move from virtualization to cloud computing.

This year, Uncle Joe, the strange brother, comes back from abroad and will attend your Thanksgiving dinner. Uncle Joe's intervention has made a big difference in your environment. For example, Uncle Joe's request for a Turkey has all along ruined the way you cut the turkey. In other words, Uncle Joe wants a turkey, and you usually cut it into two slices. In addition, Uncle Joe and Aunt Mimi could not get along, which meant that the table seats had to be adjusted. The question before you is how do you entertain Uncle Joe while still being able to make sure that the other guests have enough turkey and that there will be no all-out fighting in the course of dinner? Now, let's talk about cloud computing!

Back to the problem of operation, how can you dynamically divide your computing pool, to ensure that your existing customers continue to get the level of service they expect without adding resources (some situations may require additional capacity, but in this case, we assume that resources are already available, But you need to split the resource pool again, and you don't have to affect the performance of others because you want to coexist with another customer. These are challenges when it organizations move into cloud computing.

The traditional approach in it is that each application relies on its own dedicated hardware. Therefore, if an application requires more storage, it throws several hard drives into the storage array. If the application requires more processors, it throws several blades into the rack or adds several nodes to the rack. This approach to application stacking makes the application less likely to be affected by other applications running in the datacenter, as data centers often separate these applications with Quality-of-service QoS-controlled subnets in the router. All in all, this simple approach is beautiful as long as it is not unrealistic, expensive and wasteful. When these applications are placed in the same resource pool and the cost of electricity and cooling decreases, resource utilization increases and the overall complexity of managing the entire environment grows exponentially. This is what we assume you will encounter when delivering cloud computing and not just virtualization.

Moving from virtualization to cloud computing requires a lot of planning, training, and new tools. Once again, with our turkey analogy, once you've fixed the way you cut the turkey, you'll be using it for a year or so without making any changes. However, when Uncle Joe shows up, to meet Uncle Joe's needs, you need to know how the new method of chopping Turkey will affect your other parts of Turkey's cutting. If, in some cases, people get up so that they can talk more freely, Uncle Joe sits next to Aunt Mimi, a Thanksgiving that everyone will talk about for years to come. So you have to be like a traffic policeman, commanding them when everyone gets up and telling everyone where to go and where not to go.

The above scenario tells us that we need tools to support cloud-based capacity management, requiring tools to support governance controls on virtual machines, and the need to automate and consolidate tools to make these tasks simpler so that all available human resources are not consumed in the management and operation of the physical environment. In turn, these tools are also supported by the service category and the Cloud Manager (Cloud Manager) role. As you can see, this is a comprehensive change to the existing IT environment.

So, in conclusion, hopefully this article will help you get a better understanding of cloud computing, so that you can explain to others what cloud computing is and what it takes to implement cloud computing. This is good for organizations that want to harness this vision and turn it into reality. A dynamic approach to workload requirements, better use of existing resources, and a more agile organization are key results that can be achieved by implementing cloud computing.