From Now To Cloud

Cloud computing is a buzzword in the minds of every technologist, IT strategist and business leader. You cannot ignore it and no one has yet mastered it. Cloud solution/service providers often claim to be the “one stop shop” for all what is required for taking you to the “Cloud”. However as you venture into the muddy waters of building, implementing or trying a “Now To Cloud” approach you realize it is far from the truth.

Cloud computing is a paradigm and not a solution in itself. It is very important for us to understand this. Well defined and well established technologies and solutions around IaaS, PaaS, SaaS etc exist and these are building blocks for enterprises to define and build their IT architectures. They are not the end solutions in themselves.

In our experience we have found the following as the stepping stones to build the cloud architecture:

1. Service Delivery Fabric
2. Cloud Security
3. Cloud Control Systems
4. Management of Cloud & Hybrid environments
5. Architecting for Availability

In this blog, we touch upon the first aspect – Service Delivery Fabric

Service Delivery Fabric

The success and benefits of true “Enterprise Cloud Architectures” will be best realized when the promise of the “Cloud” is implemented and delivered. Some of the use cases that need to be architected are:

1. Leveraging services that are best in class and “Public”. Examples include Office 365 or Google Apps for office productivity and integrating them with the in-premise office productivity/communication services

2. Optimally building an in-premise – private cloud with the ability to elastically and seamlessly expand to an external environment without service disruption and performance impact

3. Supporting a geographically distributed workforce with the optimal service/application performance

These translate into the following requirements:-

1. Enterprises would want to see its “Private cloud” have the ability to burst/expand into a large pool of resources – making it look as if it has an infinite capacity on demand with an “elastic” capability

2. At the same time the external world (Cloud services) should functionally look like an extension of the “local world” and they all need to be connected in a secure and encrypted manner

3. A method to securely have the ability to move or assign a given application within various infrastructure building blocks (private, public, in premise, hosted, etc) depending on the usage and functionality required

4. Ability to segregate your functional blocks to decide where you would want to physically “host” them, but still have the ability to function seamlessly. eg “Data Stores” in-premise and application environments in the external domain

Thus you need the ability to orchestrate your environment – much like the conductor of an orchestra. The need is to create a symphony between applications, data, enterprise services and enterprise consumers independent of where they are and where they get consumed in your “Enterprise Cloud Architecture”.

This requires the architecture to have the ability to interact, integrate & synchronize between different building blocks (from within your own data centre, external cloud services and the networks that enable the connectivity between them).

Hence the need for a Service Delivery Fabric which stitches all the above requirements. The building blocks of the Fabric can be architected either by using a combination of point solutions and/or services. The characteristics of the building blocks are:

Connectivity

Extended Local Network – External Resources should be seen as part of my “local network” very similar to the Virtual Data Centre concept. This helps in the external resources being seen as an extension of the local environment and helps in providing consistent enterprise wide network access as well as governance and policy deployment

Secured Connectivity – Ability to establish secure connectivity between service sources (Enterprise Private Cloud, Public Clouds -SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and service consumer environments. These will need to have data encrypted from inside the corporate firewall across the different networks to the service delivery point inside the cloud infrastructures

Optimized WAN Networks - Networks with the ability to interconnect and deliver service performance between service source and points of service consumption which are not necessarily close by or in proximity.

Identity & Access Control

Directory Services - While you might take external “Cloud” components (e.g. SaaS – Office 365, Salesforce, PaaS – Cloud Foundry, IaaS – AWS) to integrate in your Enterprise Cloud Architecture” – you will want to retain control of your “Identity and Access Control” mechanisms like your corporate directory services

Manageability

Consistent View – Once you have a common enterprise cloud architecture you want to ensure that you are able to view all the available resources both internal (in-premise) and external (Clouds) as a common set of resources. Thereby you will be able to apply consistently your existing service management and provide an operationally transparent manageable environment using existing tools, policies and procedures

Global Load Balancing - Since you want the resource pool (which is a combination of multiple physical resource environments ) to be physically seen as one logical block as well as have the ability to direct/redirect traffic to the appropriate “block”, It will potentially be also required for disaster management.

Understanding the needs for visualizing a Service Delivery Fabric is one of the first key first steps towards building your cloud journey and in our upcoming editions we take you through the other critical enablers for defining and building your cloud journey. Keep watching this space for more.

Tags: Cloud, Cloud service delivery fabric, Microland, Now2cloud, Private Cloud, Public Cloud

	Author: M S Rangaraj MSRangaraj
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