Zhang Yi: Cloud platform turns it into a service

December 12, 2012 Cloud World Congress grand opening. In the "Cloud @ Practice" Forum scene, cloud technology director Zhang Yi introduced the cloud technology independent research and development software PRODUCT Skyform clouds management platform.

The following is a live speech record:

Let me introduce skyform cloud management platform, this is the cloud technology independent research and development of a software PRODUCT, we look at it can help us IT managers to solve what problems.

Problems solved by Skyform Cloud management platform

Problem one, traditional it in the initial investment will present such a situation, the initial input is very large, with the equipment life, including the initial return is disproportionate, resulting in a large investment, but the benefit is very small, this is the current problem.

Problem two, there will be operating costs. In the operating costs, there will be so many problems, system deployment, maintenance need more professional people to operate, there are resource sharing issues, many systems between the utilization of resources can not be effectively improved, the sharing of resources can not be very beneficial to share, will cause waste of resources. If the resources of a system cannot be fully occupied, the other systems are almost impossible to use, which is a problem. There is also a scale requirement, in fact the smaller the data center, its unit operating costs are very high. This is our summary of question two.

Problem three, resource utilization. In fact, this is relatively high availability of resources is contradictory, we all know, in order to ensure the high reliability of the business, basically we will do ha, do two machines, what is this situation? We use a backup system that is the same as the production system, placed on the edge, in order to improve usability, in fact the security of this approach is guaranteed, but basically wasted half of the resources.

Question four, power costs. Now the cost of electricity is basically far greater than the server's equipment value, including the power consumption of the server network equipment, including refrigeration equipment, air-conditioning and other power consumption, as well as an alternating current conversion, the loss of electricity conversion, will lead to the increase in the cost of electricity, this is our summary of the fourth it problem.

We also need to take a look at the application-related it area, which is based on the system within the mobile operator, and we have also summed up a problem to help it optimize its IT systems. The main situation is the business process to achieve a relatively long, a new system, from social procurement to installation and commissioning, coupled with a number of ancillary, the final line of business is a very long process, this is a problem. There are a variety of small business platform many, basically will operate alone, purchase separately, design, and then deploy implementation, these small business systems between the idle resources can not be shared, this is the problem two. Another problem is that the equipment is very dispersed, there may be 10 to 20 business units within a company, each business unit may have 10 to dozens of different businesses, scattered in many places, different floors and data centers, which require us to configure a lot of professional maintenance staff, even so, maintenance costs are high, What about the maintenance effect? Not very well, this is question three. There is also a system of heterogeneity, now a variety of easy to structure devices are also many, X86 servers, including rack-type, blade, also includes small machines, all of these heterogeneous environment to the operation and maintenance personnel caused a great difficulty, this is the problem four. These are the problems that we have summed up at present existing IT system.

The benefits of cloud computing for it

We look at cloud computing to solve what problems, first, it does not require a huge one-time input, it needs a resource pool such a concept, it can be dynamic elastic expansion, so in the beginning of the business start-up, there is no need for all IT equipment to buy all at once, we can according to the actual business development, Add the resources you need to the pool to reduce the cost of initial investment.

Second, reduce operating costs through automated management. In fact, automation management also contains several levels of meaning, first of all, the application of the deployment is not required automation, was basically by manual installation, it is now possible to rely on the machine automatic way to deploy this business, this is one aspect of automation; The management process also requires a process of automation, including incident management, change management, according to the previous tradition of it and SM, the need for each process, event flow, fault process for a standardized process management, which can also be integrated into the field of automation management. Resource sharing is the promotion of resource utilization without affecting the high availability of the business. The easiest way to do this is to be virtualized. At present, more mainstream virtualization manufacturers can use virtual machines to ensure high availability through thermal migration technology. In addition, the centralized deployment of hardware reduces PUE value and saves power costs. This is some of the benefits that cloud computing can bring to the current IT environment.

The purpose of cloud platform development is to transform it into a service

We look at the traditional it application of the island to the evolution of the cloud, each application has a supporting hardware and software infrastructure, applications and applications between the independent existence, we describe this situation as an application island, this is the current traditional IT system encountered the first problem. We can extend it down and become a homogeneous resource by clustering, and we can provide support for applications in resource pools. Further down is heterogeneous, eventually we will develop to the it as a service ... To give a simple example, the original IT department, operation and Maintenance department, basically is the cost center, it is usually responsible for it planning, operation and maintenance services, is a typical cost center, that is to say that you have done this thing, no one will praise you, think it should, but if the bad is your problem, Now we want to turn the IT department into a profit center and sell something. Is IT services. This can be reflected in two areas, one is the public cloud, the typical provider of IaaS like Amazon, which sells it as a service; the other is the private cloud within the enterprise, which, though not sold out, ultimately provides IT services, which is what we call the ultimate goal of cloud computing, This is also the purpose of our cloud platform development, is to turn it into a service.

The development path of cloud computing platform, we are all familiar with, from IaaS to PAAs to SaaS, although this is the cloud computing platform development trend, but they do not have the inevitable, or who is above the inevitable link. Many of our customers first built the IaaS platform, moved the application to the resource pool, the application as an Internet business for the industry, and implemented SaaS applications, which are not PAAs.

Cloud platform construction is around such a center, four aspects. A central point is to reduce TCO, four aspects of the first is to solve the problem of resource sharing, the second solution to automated management issues, the third solution to data and information integration, the last to resolve the integration of business logic, which is our cloud platform efforts in four directions.

From the development of the cloud platform, the current IaaS part of the basic has, not only the virtualization, heterogeneous resource pool management, many tenants, security and so we have the basic. PAAs level we will provide application automation deployment, as we mentioned just now, it is entirely by the machine to complete the entire configuration of a business and on-line trial run, this process is reflected in our PAAs platform category. SaaS now Cloud technology does not develop itself, but we can support SaaS applications on the cloud platform. This is our overall development trend.

Skyform Cloud Platform architecture includes a resource management, resource pool to allocate resources, scheduling up, look at the resource lifecycle, management, for resources we also need to monitor, need operation, which are included in the resource management level. Part of the operation management, we want to turn it into a service sell, sell out process is the process of operation, this operation process, may include some service templates, service catalogs, orders, billing audit, billing, etc., these functions are basically operational management, but also with a portal, Portals provide different kinds of portals based on different objects of use, with end users, and through our platform to order IT services in a self service way, by a self service portal, operations managers have an interface to do operations management. The resource Manager uses the resource management portal to use a nested system.

Resource-oriented or service-oriented? We have just said half a day of resources, but services are often overlooked places, in fact, in the market can see a lot of manufacturers are just mentioning resources, we think that in fact, the service should give more attention. For services, the service itself is a demand for resources, we build the purpose of the cloud platform, in fact, to support the cloud platform running on the services, rather than to manage resources and management resources. How resources are managed, how they are distributed, how they become it, and how they become services require that we define the services and what resources are needed to differentiate them.

In fact, the process of defining a service is in the process of creating a service template, the service may be interlinked, can be categorized, we put some common, or the same service into a class, as a template, in a service template, through differentiated services to encapsulate resources.

The characteristics of the Sky platform

First, we have a wealth of computing capacity, network, storage services, we also have a flexible resource domain mechanism, the large pool of resources or according to different types of business, it is possible within the enterprise is according to different departments, different application systems, to draw some of the resources, the same is in the large pool of resources, There is also a need to logically differentiate certain specific specialized business areas, but all of these businesses are actually sharing resource pools at this level of the resource pool, and the logical domain concept is to define a quota for each application that can be shared within his quota, which is considered for resource domains.

The second is automated deployment, application deployment, user Service capabilities and heterogeneous resource management, but also with the traditional monitoring, reporting, security management and so on, by these main features constitute the cloud platform of Cloud.

The function of Sky cloud Platform

The service catalog is basically a service that is displayed in the IT service, which can be selected like a la carte menu. This is the entire virtual machine service process, from the user into the service portal, through the service catalog to buy the IT products he needs, the entire process, and ultimately from our platform to apply for, use, open this kind of IT services.

We can also use a number of virtual machines to build a complete set of application operating environment, it is also possible, not necessarily a stand-alone.

For the application of container services, we are more popular in the current several sets of applications, set a number of service templates, users can choose the application template as needed, and finally packaged into a service.

The following are some of the management-level functions, including operations management, and resource management, including the management of ordinary users ' services. This is some end-to-end process, as the user role is different, the process is not the same, these processes are basically can be defined, tracked, executed, modified, so the process is very flexible, not a very dead process.

For heterogeneous management, not only the equipment level of heterogeneous, different equipment brands, different hardware devices, for virtualization support, we are also supporting the mainstream of the X86 virtualization architecture, while the traditional minicomputer partitioning technology, can also support.

Management of virtual machines and minicomputer. Storage resources can achieve unified storage management capabilities, not only array storage, but also distributed storage, from traditional interfaces, both to support sun storage, but also to support the storage of NFS, all by the unified management platform to manage the allocation.

For resource scheduling, we have good scheduling mechanism, vertical priority, horizontal priority, through open allocation policy interface, add new allocation strategy.

The same can be done with network resource management, by supporting third party network devices, such as Cisco, and Huawei to integrate with them to realize the function of network virtualization in the cloud platform.

This is the capacity of large-scale automatic deployment, can alleviate the workload of people, this is ITSM operation and maintenance process management software, including operations management, operation and maintenance, as long as the part of the process, we will refer to the relevant provisions, to do the specific process management.

Report statistics, we can support two approaches, one is the current system built some useful reports, will further support the user to customize their own reports, which is our next step to continue the direction of efforts.

In the cloud Platform security considerations, in fact, we also have a variety of solutions, of course, we do not rule out the traditional security measures, including firewall ids,ips, we will remain, the introduction of cloud computing is more data is centralized storage, resources will be shared, there will be multi-tenant concept, Here we will focus on preventing some of the conflicts between shared resources, including the user's own security management, virtual machine isolation, network application isolation, which is also in our Cloud Platform security system to consider.

Finally, summed up the advantages of the Sky platform, first, we have a complete product and solution; Secondly, through the optimization of the infrastructure can improve the management of resources; Third, we are the user's application to design the resource management, so it and the application of the user's needs are combined very close; There are many successful cases.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)