Walking in the Cloud

Continuing the Cloud knowledge series from the “From Now to Cloud“ article where we discussed about the Cloud Service Delivery Fabric, in this blog we will focus further upon the Cloud Management aspect which is what organizations are struggling to cope up with in the changing IT scenario.

Predominant market trends strongly indicate the emerging IT environment to be a combination of traditional IT environments and services from public and private Cloud which will be delivered and consumed via multiple delivery models of SaaS, PaaS or IaaS. To derive the most out of such hybrid environments, tools will undoubtedly play a pivotal role. While the existing IT management tools are equipped to manage the traditional environments very well, they are not fully geared to cater to the intricacies of the new hybrid world. Hence there is an actual need for a Cloud Management System that is capable of answering questions such as:

•       How do I provision physical server, virtual machines and public Cloud services all through the same console?

•       How is Configuration Management carried out and how is the CMDB populated in a highly dynamic virtualized environment?

•       How is the Automation and Orchestration of all my processes and workflows taken care of?

•       How does Capacity Management happen and consequently Capacity Optimization, especially in the Private Cloud environment?

The answers to the above and many more such questions are not available in a magical tool or set of tools. It lies in a Cloud Management System that comprises a comprehensive framework consisting of multiple tools and more importantly a set of processes that govern them.

Just to explain this concept better, shown below is a layered approach of managing hybrid environments comprising of Cloud and traditional environments. The presence of tools for each layer is also detailed below but the key for organizations is to first identify the layers, the activities involved in each of these layers and the tools / processes / frameworks that will help manage these activies in a seamless manner.

Fig: A Layered Approach to Hybrid Environment Management

The lowest layer of “Provisioning” tasks takes care of activities such as provisioning a bare metal server, dynamic provisioning of virtual machines, provisioning of a LUN or provisioning of a network switch. Hence to enable this, the Cloud Management System needs a self service based provisioning portal through which users can request anytime and provision resources across physical, virtual and public Cloud providers. There are many tools currently available both for physical resource provisioning and virtual machine provisioning with all virtualization vendors providing their own self service portals.

Once the resources are provisioned, their usage needs to be monitored, metered and billed/ charged back accordingly. Especially in case of virtual resources, the system should be capable to proactively monitor capacity availability, identify idle capacity and have the ability to reclaim capacity thereby eliminating VM Sprawl and optimizing capacity. The Cloud Management System should hence aid in creating templates and profiles which will ease the self-provisioning process. This is a niche area and many virtualization vendors and specialist vendors are coming up with tools and offerings in this space.

The servers, storage and network resources, be it physical or virtual need to be proactively monitored and managed. The traditional management activities such as Patch Management, Backup Management, troubleshooting, Performance Management, Availability Management need to be taken care of. This is a solved problem and there are many established players providing such tools.

Automation is critical especially in a hybrid world. This could be automation of provisioning, resource management or even run book automation of day to day activities. Some of these features are available in the off the shelf tools but for the rest, organizations already have developed their own scripts and tools to enable the same.

Given the cross domain nature of the hybrid environment comprising of physical, virtual and Cloud resources, and also given the fact that resources could be from multiple Cloud providers, orchestrating workflows and automating these end to end becomes very crucial.

Hence, the need of the hour is a Service Management Layer that stitches all of this together and facilitates ITIL processes such as Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Configuration Management etc which encompass the day-to-day IT management activities with an objective to provide IT as a Service to the users at a superior level of service availability, performance and end user experience.

Tags: Cloud, Cloud Management, Cloud Management Services, Cloud Services, Microland, Microland Cloud Services

	Author: Sunil Sarat Sunil Sarat
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