7 habits of highly effective private cloud architects

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Seven Habits of Highly Effective Private Cloud Architects

Cloud computing provides economics of scale. Many startups

go ahead with public cloud computing which helps them start

with no upfront infra costs and grow as the business grows.

However, in the case of enterprises, public cloud computing

does not serve as a silver bullet. There are security concerns

that prevents them from utilizing the benefits of public cloud

computing. However, that does not mean, enterprise applica-

tions cannot not get the advantages of Cloud. The private

cloud comes to the rescue. Private cloud is not only virtualiza-

tion.

This paper discusses the habits of successful private cloud ar-

chitects.

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What is Private Cloud?

Cloud computing provides economics of scale. Many startups go ahead with

public cloud computing which helps them start with no upfront infra costs and

grow as the business grows. However, in the case of enterprises, public cloud

computing does not serve as a silver bullet. There are security concerns that

prevents them from utilizing the benefits of public cloud computing. However,

that does not mean, enterprise applications cannot not get the advantages of

Cloud. The private cloud comes to the rescue. Private cloud is not only virtual-

ization. There is much more to it. The private cloud depends on

Virtualization

Elasticity

Monitoring / Metering

Many organizations, have built successful private cloud implementations. A

new genre of Private cloud architects have popped in. A cloud architect is a

combination of enterprise architect, SOA architect and a cloud technologist.

To be a cloud architect, one must understand the basics of enterprise architec-

ture, be an expert in SOA Implementations and understand about IT and their

operations. Any cloud implementation involves all of these.

The cloud architect should be an expert in the existing cloud technologies –

public, private, hybrid and different types of cloud services like IAAS, PAAS,

and SAAS. A private cloud architect should have a good understanding of

competing cloud technologies.

The architect expertise differs based on if someone is a private cloud architect

or public cloud architect. Let’s go ahead and see the traits that constitute an

effective private cloud architect.

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The first and foremost thing for any cloud architect to consider is to define the

value proposition for building a private cloud environment internally. This

translates to taking some key decisions such as:

Is going the cloud way necessary?

Can public clouds solve the current infrastructure problems?

Cloud is not a silver bullet to all your organizations infrastructure problems.

Before going the cloud way, a proper cloud assessment has to be done based

on the enterprise applications portfolio. Some of the questions that you

should ask yourself are

1. How much time is going to be saved in provisioning new infrastructure?

This could be arrived at based on the SLA timings and existing data related

to the Request/ response times of the infrastructure / IT Ops team to pro-

vision infrastructure for new applications, or scale infrastructure for existing

applications

2. How much optimization of infrastructure usage will be achieved due to an

elastic private cloud implementation?

3. What is the current average infrastructure usage of applications? The appli-

cations burst in usage at specific times and most of the other times, the

infrastructure remains underutilized. This data can be fetched from differ-

ent server reports collected and calculated over a period of time.

In addition there are many questions that could be specific to each organiza-

tion. Taking all these into consideration, a cloud architect, takes a decision of

go or no go for the private cloud.

What are the layers of

Architecture?

Habit 1: Defining your value proposition

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Before going ahead with any organization wide cloud strategy initiative, an-

other important thing to do is, standardize the applications. The standardiza-

tions could be at many levels.

Technology

Architecture of applications

Release procedure of applications

Private cloud implementation will not be successful, if the processes/

Technologies in the organization are not standardized. Think of a scenario

where 40% of your enterprise apps uses Microsoft Technologies, 30% uses Ja-

va/J2EE, and the rest 30% uses other technologies, like Ruby / Python. What

will you optimize the cloud for?

One of the basic needs of cloud computing is SOA. The application architec-

ture should adhere to SOA principles, thereby getting more benefits of a

Cloud initiative. The Enterprise architecture has to be defined and followed by

applications. Apart from these, the organizations also conform to standards in

terms of data storage, external services integration, Application integration,

Intranet / Extranet Communication/integration.

How the applications are released in the organization? Is there a separate IT

Ops team, which takes care of infrastructure procurement and the release of

applications or individual projects maintain their own infrastructure? There

should be standardization, so that the processes are controlled and the private

cloud implementation could be optimized for the standardized organizational

processes.

A private cloud architect, go ahead, finds the general organizational practices

on the above mentioned areas and devises a plan for standardization which

involves least effort. Then it should be ensured that the majority of the appli-

cations that are in the cloud migration path conform to these standards.

What are the layers of

Architecture?

Habit 2: Standardizing applications

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Basic tenets of cloud computing is pooled resources. Cloud architects should

plan for consolidation of the infrastructure and virtualize. Though a set of

pooled resources alone does not make a private cloud, it is the first step in any

private cloud implementation.

Viewing the entire hardware infrastructure, data center as a set of pooled vir-

tualized resources is essential for a successful private cloud implementation.

Architects decide on various technologies for virtualization. VMWare, Mi-

crosoft Hyper v are some of the solutions that are popular and widely adopted

in enterprises.

The Virtual machines need to be managed and provisioned in an effortless

and efficient manner. Creating a resource management layer on top of the Vir-

tualized resources is the next priority of the Cloud architect. There are prod-

ucts/tools available for these. e.g. VM Ware DRS. Microsoft Hyper-v provides

Resource management capabilities too.

Given a set of system requirements, the tools should be available to provision

resources by administrators.

What are the layers of

Architecture?

Habit 3: Think virtualization

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Many of the enterprise architectures align to services. The private cloud archi-

tect has to come up with ways of providing the entire Infrastructure / resource

as a service to the consumers (application teams in the organizations). The

service layer is built on top of Virtualization layer in the private cloud. The Plat-

form required should also be provided as a service.

Different aspects of the virtualized infrastructure like provisioning should be

exposed as services. This involves building APIs and tools that interact with the

Virtualized environment.

The Infrastructure should be provided as different service templates. Example

– a small database VM template could include a SQL server DB standard edi-

tion instance with 100 GB of storage and one active passive cluster combina-

tion. This allows the application teams to choose their configuration quickly.

The cloud architects should analyze different usage and deployment scenarios

and come up with different server templates suited to the organization. This

also could be based on category of applications or portfolio of applications.

What are the layers of

Architecture?

Habit 4: Breathe services

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Private cloud architects, tend to automate, as much of the process as they can

in a typical private cloud implementation. The services that are built around

private cloud help them automate procedures of provisioning.

A typical infrastructure request looks like this:

The manual intervention in the process should be as minimal as possible. In-

ternal Services should be available for creating a new Provisioning requests

and the approval workflow mechanism. After these two steps are done, the

actual provisioning of the VMs begin, based on the services built on top of the

resource management layer. The automated provisioning system, queries the

pool of resources and makes sure, all the elements in the request could be

satisfied. Once the provisioning system is sure it has to go ahead and provi-

sion the infrastructure.

The automated provisioning system, brings down the entire infrastructure pro-

visioning from months to hours, and enable the application teams’ to start

with lower instances.

As a cloud architect, one should look at all the steps in the process that could

be automated and plan for them.

There should be systems to monitor the performance of the existing machine

instances and automatically increase or downsize the capacity, thereby opti-

mizing the usage. The design of efficient systems with least manual interven-

tion to automate provisioning and maintenance of the VMs will result in a very

high cost effective, customer friendly private cloud implementation.

What are the layers of

Architecture?

Habit 5: Automate

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Cloud architects should be crazy about security. Testing every element of their

implementation for security becomes a habit. The fact that every piece of in-

frastructure is within the firewall does not mean the security is taken care of.

Think through all the best security implementations at different levels. Be it,

the hardening of the servers or robust and secure services and API.

Architects should plan for the penetration testing of their environment and be

crazy about the security implementations. Not only about a malicious user

getting access to the environment, but also the authorization issues within the

valid user base. One application developer should not be able to get access to

any of the elements of Private cloud of other Application.

What are the layers of

Architecture?

Habit 6: Defining your value proposition

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The success of a private cloud implementation depends on the monitoring

and measuring mechanisms in place. A private cloud architect should plan and

create templates for different reports. Also tools around monitoring mecha-

nisms should be put in place. These monitoring mechanisms should provide

feedback to the automation tools that we discussed earlier.

Measuring the behavior of different application instances in the private cloud,

enable the decision making process of optimizing the private cloud imple-

mentation.

Keeping a tab on the private cloud utilization and performance and improving

it continuously should be a continuous activity for any private cloud architect.

This ensures that private cloud evolves over a period of time, to a more opti-

mal one for the organization.

What are the layers of

Architecture?

Habit 7: Monitor and measure

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