As a strategic part of your move to the Cloud, your Platform decision will greatly impact how you can maximize your return on investment. The platform is just not simply a layer of technology. To fulfill the definition of 'Platform', it must meet 3 essential criteria:
The Platform helps to achieve the goals of the various cloud components. In a cloud, there are many layers of the platform - the hardware, the hypervisor & the cloud resources management. Each layer provides certain level of abstraction, interfaces & connectors for the next layer and obviously tangible value!
Cloud systems depend on the abstraction away from the virtualized resources, but the physical hardware beneath these virtual resources is critical. The underlying physical servers & storage are the foundation of this behemoth infrastructure and their quality is of utmost concern. Great care should be taken while designing & selecting the physical layer that will be the backbone of your cloud.
This physical layer seamlessly interacts with the hypervisor that provides administrators the ability to partition the physical servers into various virtual servers and hides the complexity of the underlying operating system and its complexities. The hypervisor acts as an agent that just needs to know that it has to setup a cloud service. The source of this request, which cluster to choose, what is the role of the service and what the service will it accomplish is not known to the hypervisor. Different hypervisors offer different type of features & flexibility and there are 3 considerations to keep in mind when choosing your hypervisor:
The cloud resources management layer sits above the hypervisor that abstracts the virtual servers & storage and provides them to the users as a Cloud Service option where users can select & configure the service that they want by adding the components to their shopping cart. A good cloud management technology should integrate both upwards to the Data Center Management environment and downwards to all the underlying resources including hypervisors and should simplify & automate the various components. Select this layer carefully.
Together, all the above 3 layers are the basic platform layers for your cloud. Choose them very carefully as this is going to be the foundation stone of your Cloud!
References to a paper from Bryan Che, Red Hat
- Create a Standard Interface for users to "Plug-In"
- Hide the complexity underneath
- Provide quantifiable & tangible benefits to the users
The Platform helps to achieve the goals of the various cloud components. In a cloud, there are many layers of the platform - the hardware, the hypervisor & the cloud resources management. Each layer provides certain level of abstraction, interfaces & connectors for the next layer and obviously tangible value!Cloud systems depend on the abstraction away from the virtualized resources, but the physical hardware beneath these virtual resources is critical. The underlying physical servers & storage are the foundation of this behemoth infrastructure and their quality is of utmost concern. Great care should be taken while designing & selecting the physical layer that will be the backbone of your cloud.
This physical layer seamlessly interacts with the hypervisor that provides administrators the ability to partition the physical servers into various virtual servers and hides the complexity of the underlying operating system and its complexities. The hypervisor acts as an agent that just needs to know that it has to setup a cloud service. The source of this request, which cluster to choose, what is the role of the service and what the service will it accomplish is not known to the hypervisor. Different hypervisors offer different type of features & flexibility and there are 3 considerations to keep in mind when choosing your hypervisor:
- Type of workload that will be run on the hypervisor
- Compatibility with the Management Layer that you have
- Compatibility with other hypervisors in your environment
The cloud resources management layer sits above the hypervisor that abstracts the virtual servers & storage and provides them to the users as a Cloud Service option where users can select & configure the service that they want by adding the components to their shopping cart. A good cloud management technology should integrate both upwards to the Data Center Management environment and downwards to all the underlying resources including hypervisors and should simplify & automate the various components. Select this layer carefully.
Together, all the above 3 layers are the basic platform layers for your cloud. Choose them very carefully as this is going to be the foundation stone of your Cloud!
References to a paper from Bryan Che, Red Hat
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