Nuts & Bolts of the Cloud

As I wait for my son to wrap his Saturday morning MindVenture class, I decided to type this post on my Blackberry about what is behind the Cloud, its components, basically it's Nuts & Bolts!  I am surely going to have sore thumbs after finishing this article! :-)

So here you go..

At the very heart of a cloud service is a Central Database expressed in an acronym as CMDB. In that layer are stored Policies and the Definitive Media Library that govern how things should be configured & controls around the same. 

The next layer has the elaborative Data Model over which the Service Manager sits as a dictator governing the Workflow Manager, Platform Manager & the Resource Manager. It also controls the Infrastructure Resources like network, storage, servers, hardware, software and all the other bells & whistles. Around these Managers is the Provider API that hooks up all the relevant managers to the providers - Control Provider, Advice Provider & the Resource Providers. These Providers do the actual dirty work of provisioning, communicating, reporting and configuring the resources as per the user requirements.

Beyond the Provider API, there is usually a Cloud API that lets external customer systems talk (integrate) to the Cloud Solution and beyond that is the Cloud User Interface that the Cloud End Users, Cloud Administrators  use to control, monitor & deploy their Cloud Experience!

Each of the above component is a beast in its own way with complex technologies under it. Unless all of these components synch up together and work like a team, the Cloud Solution may just fall apart!

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