Cloud Computing Management

Overview

It is the responsibility of cloud provider to manage resources and their performance. Management may include several aspects of cloud computing such as load balancing, performance, storage and backups, capacity, deployment , etc. Management is required to access full functionality of resources in the cloud.

Cloud Management Tasks

Cloud Management involves a number of tasks to be performed by the cloud provider to ensure efficient use of cloud resources. Here, we will discuss some of these tasks:

AUDIT SYSTEM BACKUPS

It is required to timely audit the backups to ensure you can successfully restore randomly selected files of different users. Backups can be performed in following ways:

• Backing up files by the company, from on-site computers to the disks that reside within the cloud.

• Backing up files by the cloud provider.

It is necessary to know if cloud provider has encrypted the data, who has access to that data and if the backup is taken at different locations, you must know where.

SYSTEM'S DATA FLOW

The managers should develop a diagram describing a detailed process flow. This process flow will describe the movement of company's data throughout the cloud solution.

BEWARE OF VENDOR LOCK-IN

The managers must know the procedure to exit from services of a particular cloud provider. There must exist procedures, enabling the managers to export company's data to a file and importing it to another provider.

KNOWING PROVIDER'S SECURITY PROCEDURES

The managers should know the security plans of the provider for different services:

• Multitenant use

• E-commerce processing

• Employee screening

• Encryption policy

MONITOR CAPACITY PLANNING AND SCALING CAPABILITIES

The managers should know the capacity planning in order to ensure whether the cloud provider will meet the future capacity requirement for his business or not.

It is also required to manage scaling capabilities in order to ensure services can be scaled up or down as per the user need.

MONITOR AUDIT-LOG USE

In order to identify the errors in the system, managers must audit the logs on a regular basis.

SOLUTION TESTING AND VALIDATION

It is necessary to test the solutions provided by the provider in order to validate that it gives the correct result and is error-free. This is necessary for a system to be robust and reliable.

Community Cloud Model

Community Cloud

The Community Cloud allows system and services to be accessible by group of organizations. It shares the infrastructure between several organizations from a specific community. It may be managed internally or by the third-party.

Benefits

There are many benefits of deploying cloud as community cloud model. The following diagram shows some of those benefits:

COST EFFECTIVE

Community cloud offers same advantage as that of private cloud at low cost.
Sharing Between Organizations
Community cloud provides an infrastructure to share cloud resources and capabilities among several organizations.
SECURITY
Community cloud is comparatively more secure than the public cloud.

ISSUES

Since all data is housed at one location, one must be careful in storing data in community cloud because it might be accessible by others.

It is also challenging to allocate responsibilities of governance, security and cost.

Hybrid Cloud Model

Hybrid Cloud

The Hybrid Cloud is a mixture of public and private cloud. Non-critical activities are performed using public cloud while the critical activities are performed using private cloud.

Benefits

There are many benefits of deploying cloud as hybrid cloud model. The following diagram shows some of those benefits:

SCALABILITY

It offers both features of public cloud scalability and private cloud scalability.

FLEXIBILITY

It offers both secure resources and scalable public resources.

COST EFFICIENCY

Public cloud are more cost effective than private, therefore hybrid cloud can have this saving.

SECURITY
Private cloud in hybrid cloud ensures higher degree of security.

Disadvantages

NETWORKING ISSUES

Networking becomes complex due to presence of private and public cloud.

SECURITY COMPLIANCE
It is necessary to ensure that cloud services are compliant with organization's security policies.

INFRASTRUCTURAL DEPENDENCY

The hybrid cloud model is dependent on internal IT infrastructure, therefore it is necessary to ensure redundancy across data centers.

Private Cloud Model

Private Cloud

The Private Cloud allows systems and services to be accessible with in an organization. The Private Cloud is operated only within a single organization. However, It may be managed internally or by third-party.

Benefits

There are many benefits of deploying cloud as private cloud model. The following diagram shows some of those benefits:

HIGHER SECURITY AND PRIVACY

Private cloud operations are not available to general public and resources are shared from distinct pool of resources, therefore, ensures high security and privacy.

MORE CONTROL

Private clouds have more control on its resources and hardware than public cloud because it is accessed only within an organization.

COST AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY

Private cloud resources are not as cost effective as public clouds but they offer more efficiency than public cloud.

Disadvantages

Here are the disadvantages of using private cloud model:

RESTRICTED AREA

Private cloud is only accessible locally and is very difficult to deploy globally.

INFLEXIBLE PRICING

In order to fulfill demand, purchasing new hardware is very costly.

LIMITED SCALABILITY

Private cloud can be scaled only within capacity of internal hosted resources.

ADDITIONAL SKILLS

In order to maintain cloud deployment, organization requires more skilled and expertise.

Public Cloud Model

Public Cloud

The Public Cloud allows systems and services to be easily accessible to general public, e.g., Google, Amazon, Microsoft offers cloud services via Internet.

Benefits 

There are many benefits of deploying cloud as public cloud model. The following diagram shows some of those benefits:

COST EFFECTIVE

Since public cloud share same resources with large number of consumer, it has low cost.

RELIABILITY

Since public cloud employs large number of resources from different locations, if any of the resource fail, public cloud can employ another one.

FLEXIBILITY

It is also very easy to integrate public cloud with private cloud, hence gives consumers a flexible approach.

LOCATION INDEPENDENCE

Since, public cloud services are delivered through Internet, therefore ensures location independence.

UTILITY STYLE COSTING

Public cloud is also based on pay-per-use model and resources are accessible whenever consumer needs it.

HIGH SCALABILITY

Cloud resources are made available on demand from a pool of resources, i.e., they can be scaled up or down according the requirement.

Disadvantages

Here are the disadvantages of public cloud model:

LOW SECURITY

In public cloud model, data is hosted off-site and resources are shared publicly, therefore does not ensure higher level of security.

LESS CUSTOMIZABLE

It is comparatively less customizable than private cloud.

Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Cloud Infrastructure Components

Cloud infrastructure consists of servers, storage, network, management software, and deployment software and platform virtualization.

HYPERVISOR

Hypervisor is a firmware or low-level program that acts as a Virtual Machine Manager. It allows to share the single physical instance of cloud resources between several tenants.

MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

Management Software helps to maintain and configure the infrastructure.

DEPLOYMENT SOFTWARE

Deployment software helps to deploy and integrate the application on the cloud.

NETWORK 

Network is the key component of cloud infrastructure. It allows to connect cloud services over the Internet. It is also possible to deliver network as a utility over the Internet, i.e., the consumer can customize the network route and protocol.

SERVER 

Server helps to compute the resource sharing and offer other services such as resource allocation and deallocation, monitoring resources, security, etc.

STORAGE 

Cloud uses distributed file system for storage purpose. If one of the storage resource fails, then it can be extracted from another one which makes cloud computing more reliable.

Infrastructural Constraints 

Fundamental constraints that cloud infrastructure should implement are shown in the following diagram:

Since virtualization is the key to share resources in cloud environment. But it is not possible to satisfy the demand with single resource or server. Therefore, there must be transparency in resources, load balancing and application, so that we can scale them on demand.

SCALABILITY 

Scaling up an application delivery solution is not that easy as scaling up an application because it involves configuration overhead or even re-architecting the network. So, application delivery solution is need to be scalable which will require the virtual infrastructure such that resource can be provisioned and de-provisioned easily.

INTELLIGENT MONITORING

To achieve transparency and scalability, application solution delivery will need to be capable of intelligent monitoring.

SECURITY The mega data center in the cloud should be securely architected. Also the control node, a entry point in mega data center also needs to be secure.

Cloud Computing-Architecture

The Cloud Computing architecture comprises of many cloud components, each of them are loosely coupled. We can broadly divide the cloud architecture into two parts:

• Front End

• Back End 

Each of the ends are connected through a network, usually via Internet. The following diagram shows the graphical view of cloud computing architecture:

FRONT END

Front End refers to the client part of cloud computing system. It consists of interfaces and applications that are required to access the cloud computing platforms, e.g., Web Browser.

BACK END

Back End refers to the cloud itself. It consists of all the resources required to provide cloud computing services. It comprises of huge data storage, virtual machines, security mechanism, services, deployment models, servers, etc.

Important Points

• It is the responsibility of the back end to provide built-in security mechanism, traffic control and protocols.

• The server employs certain protocols, known as middleware, helps the connected devices to communicate with each other.

Cloud Computing-Technologies

There are certain technologies that are working behind the cloud computing platforms making cloud computing flexible, reliable, usable. These technologies are listed below:

• Virtualization

• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

• Grid Computing

• Utility Computing

Virtualization
Virtualization is a technique, which allows to share single physical instance of an application or resource among multiple organizations or tenants (customers). It does so by assigning a logical name to a physical resource and providing a pointer to that physical resource when demanded.

The Multitenant architecture offers virtual isolation among the multiple tenants and therefore the organizations can use and customize the application as though they each have its own instance running.



Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA)
Service-Oriented Architecture helps to use applications as a service for other applications regardless the type of vendor, product or technology. Therefore, it is possible to exchange of data between applications of different vendors without additional programming or making changes to services.

Grid Computing

Grid Computing refers to distributed computing in which a group of computers from multiple locations are connected with each other to achieve common objective. These computer resources are heterogeneous and geographically dispersed.

Grid Computing breaks complex task into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces are distributed to CPUs that reside within the grid.

Utility Computing

Utility computing is based on Pay per Use model. It offers computational resources on demand as a metered service. Cloud computing, grid computing, and managed IT services are based on the concept of Utility computing.

Cloud Computing Deployment Phase

This phase focuses on both of the above two phases. It involves the following two steps:

• Cloud Computing Provider

• Maintenance and Technical Service

CLOUD COMPUTING PROVIDER

This step includes selecting a cloud provider on basis of Service Level Agreement (SLA), which defines the level of service the provider will meet.

MAINTENANCE AND TECHNICAL SERVICE

Maintenance and Technical services are provided by the cloud provider. They must have to ensure the quality of services.

Cloud Computing - Planning

Before deploying applications to cloud, it is necessary to consider your business requirements. Following are the issues one must have to think about:

• Data Security and Privacy Requirement

• Budget Requirements

• Type of cloud - public, private or hybrid

• Data backup requirements

• Training requirements

• Dashboard and reporting requirements

• Client access requirements

• Data export requirements

To meet all of these requirements, it is necessary to have well-compiled planning. Here in this tutorial, we will discuss the various planning phases that must be practised by an enterprise before migrating the entire business to cloud. Each of these planning phases are described in the following diagram:

Strategy Planning Phase

In this, we analyze the strategy problems that customer might face. There are two steps to perform this analysis:

• Cloud Computing Value Proposition

•  Cloud Computing Strategy Planning

CLOUD COMPUTING VALUE PROPOSITION 

In this, we analyze the factors influencing the customers when applying cloud computing mode and target the key problems they wish to solve. These key factors are:

• IT management simplification

• operation and maintenance cost reduction

• business mode innovation

• low cost outsourcing hosting

• high service quality outsourcing hosting. 

All of the above analysis helps in decision making for future development.



CLOUD COMPUTING STRATEGY PLANNING

The strategy establishment is based on the analysis result of the above step. In this step, a strategy document is prepared according to the conditions a customer might face when applying cloud computing mode.

Cloud Computing Tactics Planning Phase

This step performs analysis of problems and risks in the cloud application to ensure the customers that the cloud computing successfully meet their business goals. This phase involves the following planning steps:

• Business Architecture Development

• IT Architecture development

• Requirements on Quality of Service Development

• Transformation Plan development

BUSINESS ARCHITECTURE DEVELOPMENT

In this step, we recognize the risks that might be caused by cloud computing application from a business perspective.

IT ARCHITECTURE DEVELOPMENT

In this step, we identify the applications that support the business processes and the technologies required to support enterprise applications and data systems.

REQUIREMENTS ON QUALITY OF SERVICE DEVELOPMENT

Quality of Service refers to the non-functional requirements such as reliability, security, disaster recovery, etc. The success of applying cloud computing mode depends on these non-functional factors.

TRANSFORMATION PLAN DEVELOPMENT

In this step, we formulate all kinds of plans that are required to transform current business to cloud computing modes.

Characteristics

There are four key characteristics of cloud computing. They are shown in the following diagram:

ON DEMAND SELF-SERVICE
Cloud Computing allows the users to use web services and resources on demand. One can logon to a website at any time and use them.

BROAD NETWORK ACCESS
Since Cloud Computing is completely web based, it can be accessed from anywhere and at any time.

RESOURCE POOLING
Cloud Computing allows multiple tenants to share a pool of resources. One can share single physical instance of hardware, database and basic infrastructure.

RAPID ELASTICITY
It is very easy to scale up or down the resources at any time.
Resources used by the customers or currently assigned to customers are automatically monitored and resources. It make it possible

MEASURED SERVICE
Service Models & Deployment Models are described in above section.

History

The concept of Cloud Computing came into existence in 1950 with implementation of mainframe computers, accessible via thin/static clients. Since then, cloud computing has been evolved from static clients to dynamic ones from software to services. The following diagram explains the evolution of cloud computing:

Benefits

Cloud Computing has numerous advantages. Some of them are listed below:

• One can access applications as utilities, over the Internet.

• Manipulate and configure the application online at any time.

• It does not require to install a specific piece of software to access or manipulate cloud application.

• Cloud Computing offers online development and deployment tools, programming runtime environment through Platform as a Service model.

• Cloud resources are available over the network in a manner that provides platform independent access to any type of clients.

• Cloud Computing offers on-demand self-service. The resources can be used without interaction with cloud service provider.

• Cloud Computing is highly cost effective because it operates at higher efficiencies with greater utilization. It just requires an Internet connection.

• Cloud Computing offers load balancing that makes it more reliable.

Risks

Although Cloud Computing is a great innovation in the world of computing, there also exist downsides of cloud computing. Some of them are discussed below:

SECURITY & PRIVACY
It is the biggest concern about cloud computing. Since data management and infrastructure management in cloud is provided by third-party, it is always a risk to handover the sensitive information to such providers.

Although the cloud computing vendors ensure more secure password protected accounts, any sign of security breach would result in loss of clients and businesses.

LOCK-IN
It is very difficult for the customers to switch from one Cloud Service Provider (CSP) to another. It results in dependency on a particular CSP for service.

ISOLATION FAILURE
This risk involves the failure of isolation mechanism that separates storage, memory, routing between the different tenants.


MANAGEMENT INTERFACE COMPROMISE

In case of public cloud provider, the customer management interfaces are accessible through the Internet.

INSECURE OR INCOMPLETE DATA DELETION

It is possible that the data requested for deletion may not get deleted. It happens either because extra copies of data are stored but are not available or disk destroyed also stores data from other tenants. 

Basic Concepts

There are certain services and models working behind the scene making the cloud computing feasible and accessible to end users. Following are the working models for cloud computing:

• Deployment Models

• Service Models

DEPLOYMENT MODELS 

Deployment models define the type of access to the cloud, i.e., how the cloud is located? Cloud can have any of the four types of access: Public, Private, Hybrid and Community.

PUBLIC CLOUD
The Public Cloud allows systems and services to be easily accessible to the general public. Public cloud may be less secure because of its openness, e.g., e-mail.

PRIVATE CLOUD
The Private Cloud allows systems and services to be accessible within an organization. It offers increased security because of its private nature.

COMMUNITY CLOUD
The Community Cloud allows systems and services to be accessible by group of organizations.

HYBRID CLOUD
The Hybrid Cloud is mixture of public and private cloud. However, the critical activities are performed using private cloud while the non-critical activities are performed using public cloud.

SERVICE MODELS

Service Models are the reference models on which the Cloud Computing is based. These can be categorized into three basic service models as listed below:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)

3. Software as a Service (SaaS)


There are many other service models all of which can take the form like XaaS, i.e., Anything as a Service. This can be Network as a Service, Business as a Service, Identity as a Service, Database as a Service or Strategy as a Service.
The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the most basic level of service. Each of the service models make use of the underlying service model, i.e., each inherits the security and management mechanism from the underlying model, as shown in the following diagram:

INFRASTRUCTURE AS A SERVICE (IAAS)
IaaS provides access to fundamental resources such as physical machines, virtual machines, virtual storage, etc.

PLATFORM AS A SERVICE (PAAS)
PaaS provides the runtime environment for applications, development & deployment tools, etc.

SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SAAS)
SaaS model allows to use software applications as a service to end users.

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing provides us a means by which we can access the applications as utilities, over the Internet. It allows us to create, configure, and customize applications online.

What is Cloud?

The term Cloud refers to a Network or Internet. In other words, we can say that Cloud is something, which is present at remote location. Cloud can provide services over network, i.e., on public networks or on private networks, i.e., WAN, LAN or VPN.
Applications such as e-mail, web conferencing, customer relationship management (CRM),all run in cloud.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing refers to manipulating, configuring, and accessing the applications online. It offers online data storage, infrastructure and application.



We need not to install a piece of software on our local PC and this is how the cloud computing overcomes platform dependency issues. Hence, the Cloud Computing is making our business application mobile and collaborative.