Cloud Computing: Elastic, Scalable, On-Demand IT Services for Everyone Cloud.com White Paper April 2010 Table of Contents 1 Executive Summary... 2 2 Motivation Around Cloud Computing... 2 3 Comparing Cloud Computing Infrastructure Models... 3 4 Open Source in the Cloud... 4 5 Requirements for Building Elastic Cloud Services... 4 5.1 Heterogeneous Systems Support... 5 5.2 Service Management... 5 5.3 Dynamic Workload and Resource Management... 5 5.4 Reliability, Availability and Security... 5 5.5 Integration with Datacenter Management Tools... 6 5.6 Visibility and Reporting... 6 5.7 Administrator, Developer and End User Interfaces... 6 6 Cloud.com and Cloud Computing... 7
1 Executive Summary Cloud computing promises enormous opportunities for organizations to cut costs and speed time to market while eliminating the heavy investment in IT capital and operating expenses traditionally associated with running a business. The range of solutions available today including publically hosted clouds, private internal clouds or a hybrid environment, ensure that the user whether it be an enterprise, service provider, entrepreneur or developer can find the best cloud computing solution to meet their needs and quickly gain the advantages that enable them to become more agile. The success of Amazon, ebay and Google has led to the rise of cloud computing as a new, proven architecture for how the traditional datacenter is built and managed. Built almost entirely out of commodity-based components with freely available, freely modifiable software, these new systems challenge the old way of IT and create new opportunities for how IT is consumed within the enterprise. Cloud computing can be provided within an existing enterprise datacenter or it can be delivered as a service through a cloud hosting provider, but in the end the experience to the end user is the same. Resources appear infinite, growing and shrinking based on the demand placed on the application or service being delivered. This has challenged traditional CIO wisdom and helped cloud computing grow into a must-have strategy for a diverse group of users. The foundation for this new model of computing is called infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and it has quickly become the standard for how clouds are built, managed and deployed, both within the enterprise datacenter and among service providers. This whitepaper discusses how Cloud.com is leading the revolution in cloud computing by building on established foundations, like virtualization and service management, while transforming the way that enterprises and service providers are building and deploying new IT services. 2 Motivation Around Cloud Computing Over the years, CIOs have been continually challenged with how to enable their organizations to quickly and cost-effectively deliver infrastructure and services to support end-user applications. To initially address this need, innovation in systems, applications and infrastructure were quickly delivered based on new networking capabilities and larger network performance. While some argue that cloud computing is simply an evolution in the model of network computing, one that builds on and extends existing frameworks and architectures in the datacenter, Cloud.com believes that cloud computing is a major shift and an entirely new paradigm in datacenter computing. Cloud computing delivers higher efficiency, limitless scale and faster and easier deployment of new services and systems to the end-user, thereby changing the economics of the datacenter by shifting the delivery of IT resources to an ondemand model. This is a revolution because cloud computing is opening up new business models and opportunities for both enterprise IT and service providers. The tremendous success of companies like Amazon, ebay, Google, Yahoo! has demonstrated that building out cloud infrastructure produces cost savings an order of magnitude larger than 2
a traditional enterprise can achieve with the same types of commodity hardware and open source software. However, it is when we dive into the differences in models that we start to understand that cloud computing isn t just about the market cost of individual components like compute, network and storage, but the sum of those components built up in a smarter, more efficient lightweight manner that provides higher utilization and elasticity over that of traditional datacenter models. While these are all important points to note, it s equally relevant to the discussion to consider that this new model brings not only a wealth of benefit, but also introduces new set of technical challenges. 3 Comparing Cloud Computing Infrastructure Models Built correctly, cloud computing provides significant cost advantages and provides users with the ability to become more agile and efficient in how they consume IT resources. With this said, there are many options for enterprises to consider when making the decision to move to a cloud-based architecture and choosing to deploy on publically hosted clouds, private internal clouds or a hybrid environment. There are a number of considerations that go into selecting which model is appropriate for their needs, and each has some level of trade-off. Ultimately most enterprises will use a mix of models to solve more than one problem. For example, a project that might be in early development and test phases or only delivered for a temporary timeframe might be best suited for deployment in a public cloud where IT costs are lower and the capital expense for short term needs is minimized. At the same time, a more permanent project or one that has specific requirements around security, quality of service, or compliance might be ideally deployed in a private cloud or mixed hybrid environment. Public Clouds Public clouds are designed to be billed in a pay-as-you-grow model and are run by third party service providers, offering resources like compute power, network and storage as a service. One of the benefits of public clouds is that the amount of resource built into the service provider is fundamentally larger than a typical enterprise private cloud, meaning that the solution is designed to scale up and down based on demand. This model provides customers with a way to reduce operational risk and cost by providing a flexible, scalable service that is based on consumption. Private Clouds Private clouds are essentially built for exclusive use by one client, providing more control of data, security and quality of service than in a public cloud. Private clouds can both be built and managed within the walls of an enterprise or be hosted externally through a service provider as a private cloud offering. Hybrid Clouds Hybrid clouds are a combination of both public and private cloud models. Hybrid clouds are designed to extend a private cloud with the available resources of a public cloud. This is most often seen when an enterprise anticipates planned workload spikes that generally only requires additional compute resources for a limited period of times. Hybrid models introduce the additional complexity of distributing applications and data between a public and 3
private cloud and require strong efforts around open standards, common APIs and common infrastructure to make this model possible. Regardless of implementation, enterprises are quickly realizing that the opportunity of this new model of computing fundamentally changes the way IT services are consumed within the enterprise, and it is something they need to adopt today. Addressing the need for scale, quality of service, interoperability and open systems framework, Cloud.com has created a turnkey software stack that enables both enterprises and service providers to easily build and manage infrastructure clouds to accelerate the transformation to this new model of computing. 4 Open Source in the Cloud Open source is one of the core foundations of cloud computing. Early pioneers of the cloud utilized the freely available, freely distributable model of open source to power their vision and deployment of their web-scale deployments achieving a level of scale at a bare-bones cost that had never been seen in the history of computing. The first movers in cloud computing services found the freely available open source software model most appealing, but to service providers and enterprises today, the attraction of open source is about the ability to develop a more flexible infrastructure and avoid vendor lock-in that often results from proprietary systems. Open source technologies, by nature, tend to attract dedicated and vibrant communities and ecosystems that dedicate themselves to open standards and open innovation resulting in greater choice and flexibility to consumers of their technologies. The communities forming around Linux distributions like Red Hat, Ubuntu and CentOS as well as virtualization technologies like KVM and Xen are driving forces in the establishment of standards in the cloud computing movement. For service providers, this means a variety of software and services are available to tailor their offerings and deploy them in a differentiated manner. For enterprises, this means they can quickly and easily migrate their solutions to the vendors that provide the best service and support for their specific needs. 5 Requirements for Building Elastic Cloud Services Today, service providers and enterprises that are interested in launching elastic cloud services face the difficult task of integrating complex software and hardware components from multiple vendors. The resulting system could end up being expensive to build and hard to operate, minimizing the original motives and benefits of moving to this new model. For enterprises and service providers, the successful creation and deployment of cloud services will become the foundation for their IT operations for years to come making it essential to get it right from the start. 4
For the architect chartered with building out a cloud infrastructure, there are seven key requirements that need to be addressed as they build out their strategy. They are: 5.1 Heterogeneous Systems Support Not only should cloud management solutions leverage the latest hardware, virtualization and software solutions, but they should also support a datacenter s existing infrastructure. While many of the early movers based their solutions on commodity and open source solutions like general x86 systems running open source Xen and distributions like CentOS, larger service providers and enterprises have requirements around both commodity and proprietary systems when building out their clouds. Cloud management providers must integrate with traditional IT systems as well in order to truly meet the needs of the datacenter. Companies that don t support technologies from likes of Cisco, RedHat, NetApp, EMC, VMWare and Microsoft will fall short in delivering a true cloud product that fits the needs of the datacenter. 5.2 Service Management To productize the functionality of cloud computing, it is important that administrators have a simple tool for defining and metering service offerings. A service offering is a quantified set of services and applications that end users can consume through the provider whether the cloud is private or public in nature. Service offerings should include resource guarantees, metering rules, resource management and billing cycles. The service management functionality should tie into the broader offering repository such that defined services can be quickly and easily deployed and managed by the end user. 5.3 Dynamic Workload and Resource Management In order for a cloud to be truly on-demand and elastic, while consistently able to meet consumer SLAs, the cloud must be workload- and resource-aware. Cloud computing raises the level of abstraction so that all of the components of the datacenter are virtualized, not just compute and memory. Once abstracted and deployed, it is critical that management solutions have the ability to create policies around workload and data management to ensure that maximum efficiency and performance is delivered to the system running in the cloud. This becomes even more critical as systems hit peak demand. The system must be able to dynamically prioritize systems and resources on the fly based on business priorities of the various workloads to ensure that SLAs are met. 5.4 Reliability, Availability and Security While the model and infrastructure for how IT services are delivered and consumed may have changed with cloud computing, it is still critical that these new solutions support the same characteristics that have always been important. Whether the cloud serves as a test bed for developers prototyping new services and applications or it is running the latest version of a hot social gaming application, users expect it to be up and running every minute of every day. Thinking about both availability and reliability, the cloud needs to be able to continue to operate while data remains intact in the virtual datacenter regardless of a failure in one or more components. Additionally, since most cloud architectures deal with shared resource pools across multiple groups both internal and external, security and multitennancy must be integrated into every aspect of an operational architecture and process. Services need to be able to provide access to only authorized users and in this shared resource pool model the users need to be able to trust that their data and applications are secure. 5
5.5 Integration with Datacenter Management Tools While cloud computing is a new way of consuming IT, many components of traditional datacenter management still require some level of integration with the new cloud management solution. Within most datacenters, a variety of tools are used for provisioning, customer care, billing, systems management, directory, security, etc. Cloud computing management solutions do not replace these tools and it is important that there are open APIs that integrate into existing operation, administration, maintenance and provisioning systems (OAM&P) out of the box. These include both current virtualization tools from VMWare and Citrix, but also the larger datacenter management tools from companies like IBM and HP. 5.6 Visibility and Reporting The need to manage cloud services from a performance, service level, and reporting perspective becomes paramount to the success of the deployment of the service. Without strong visibility and reporting mechanisms, the management of customer service levels, system performance, compliance and billing become increasingly difficult. Datacenter operations have the requirement of having real-time visibility and reporting capabilities within the cloud environment to ensure compliance, security, billing and chargebacks as well as other instruments, which require high levels of granular visibility and reporting. 5.7 Administrator, Developer and End User Interfaces One of the primary attributes, and successes, of existing cloud-based services on the market comes from the fact that self-service portals and deployment models shield the complexity of the cloud service from the end user. This helps by driving adoption and by decreasing operating costs as the majority of the management is offloaded to the end user. Within the self-service portal, the consumer of the service should be able to manage their own virtual datacenter, create and launch templates, manage their virtual storage, compute and network resources and access image libraries to get their services up and running quickly. Similarly, administrator interfaces must provide a single pane view into all of the physical resources, virtual machine instances, templates, service offerings, and multiple cloud users. On top of core interfaces, all of these features need to be interchangeable to developers and 3 rd parties through common API. 6
6 Cloud.com and Cloud Computing Cloud computing is a paradigm shift in how datacenters and service providers are architecting and delivering highly reliable, highly scalable services to their users in a manner that is significantly more agile and cost effective than previous models. This new model offers early adopters the ability to quickly realize the benefits of improved business agility, faster time to market and an overall reduction in capital expenditures. Cloud computing platforms are attractive because they let businesses quickly access hosted private and public resources on demand without the traditional complexities and time associated with the purchase, installation, configuration and deployment of traditional physical infrastructure. At the forefront of this paradigm shift is Cloud.com, a pioneer of cloud solutions that enable simple and cost effective deployment, management and configuration of public, private and hybrid clouds. Cloud.com is committed to bringing the benefits of open source and open standards to cloud computing and truly empowering both service providers and enterprises with a powerful foundation for transforming the way that they deliver and consume IT resources. The Cloud.com approach to cloud computing is a new approach to how companies can quickly and easily build, manage and deploy private and public clouds. Extending beyond individual virtual machine images running on commodity hardware, the Cloud.com Cloud Stack provides a turnkey solution for delivering virtual datacenters as a service delivering all of the essential components used to build, deploy and manage multi-tier and multi-tenant cloud applications in a simple to install software package. By using Cloud.com Cloud Stack as the foundation for infrastructure clouds, datacenter operators can quickly and easily build cloud services within their existing infrastructure to offer on-demand, elastic cloud services. With little time commitment and upfront investment, enterprises can quickly test cloud model and start realizing the benefits of this new IT service within minutes without the overhead of integration, professional services, and complex deployment schedules. For enterprises and service providers interested in architecting and deploying cloud services, partnering with an experienced innovator like Cloud.com ensures a faster track to realizing the true benefits of cloud computing. 2010 VMOps Inc. All rights reserved. Specifications are subject to change without notice. The VMOps logo, VMOps, Hypervisor Attached Storage, HAS, Hypervisor Aware Network, HAN, and VMSync are trademarks or registered trademarks of VMOps, Inc. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. 7