Introduction to Cloud Computing - The Cloud Manager
Transcript
hi this is keith townsend of www.virtualizegeek.com this is a continuation of our class on the introduction of cloud computing we'll talk about the different components of the infrastructure as a service specifically will focus on the cloud manager so i did want to have a quick review of the material from the last video we talked about the characteristics of a cloud computing environment the service models and the deployment models i wanted to highlight two of the characteristics of a cloud computing environment versus a virtualized environment those
two being that a cloud environment is usually or not usually actually on demand in the self-service and we measure the service that we provide to our customers the service models include software as a service platform as a service and infrastructure as a service software as a service we gave the examples of email platform as a service we gave the example of a customer building a application based on salesforce.com and infrastructure as a service is the aws computing type model of cloud computing deployment models private cloud
for a single organization community cloud for a subset of a commun of a community of users and then public cloud is widely available to all hybrid cloud being a combination of any of those three previous cloud models so the different stacks of the cloud computing model are the cloud manager compute storage and network the cloud manager is commonly referred to as the orchestration layer which is what we'll talk about throughout this video the three other layers the compute storage and network we're fairly familiar with at
this point if we've done virtualization at all the compute stack is obviously our server and virtualization platform storage are uh obviously where our data and storage will reside and then network public private shared network resources will talk to those other three models in detail in future videos so we're gonna jump right into the cloud manager the cloud manager as we stated before is the most critical component of your cloud computing platform or offering uh the cloud manager serves as the interface to your customers to their
cloud it provides an administrative interface for your system administrators and i call it the plumbing of the cloud in this image we're depicting users who are accessing applications that are stored in the cloud we give a generic uh set of applications it can be an email application database application uh development workstations sharepoint uh then uh the cloud manages the infrastructure of the cloud environment so the physical servers the storage the network the virtualization software uh the cloud manager provides the whole orchestration of all those components
we'll take a look at each one of those components individually and talk about this relationship to the cloud manager so some of the features of your typical cloud manager this list is not meant to be exhaustive but i think these are some of the minimum things that you want to look for in the cloud manager uh the data center management so basically uh if a user decides that they want to provision a machine with three gig of ram uh two cpus and 20 gig of disk
space the cloud manager needs to talk to your storage it needs to talk to your hypervisor and it needs to talk to your network to provide that virtual machine it needs to have chargeback features so how much of a resource does a uh end user use or a computing uh provision set of computing resources uh use amazon actually has some pretty advanced features for their chargeback model amazon is actually able to charge you based on the uptime of your nodes versus uh the the total amount
of pool resources that you've been provisioned at the beginning of the month so instead of building you monthly for that uh three gig workstation with two two cpu cores and 20 gig of disk space and x amount of network bandwidth they actually charge you just for the amount of time that node is up network management a lot of uh features that you would expect in your network application solution will be pushed down to the cloud manager i don't think that's as critical as a note as
a need but it should have some type of network management features at the very minimum you need to be able to speak to the network to provision network resources virtual machine management obviously you need to be able to uh shut down restart uh potentially make snapshots of virtual machines provisioning we get just gave an example of provisioning and then image repository is something that's commonly overlooked basically if i'm going to roll out 30 new windows uh 2008 machines uh how do i get the iso or
the machine image up to the provider if i have a 10 meg internet connection and i need to create 80 machines there needs to be some type of image repository or ability to create an image repository for end users to provision machines from so the different types of cloud managers i categorize infrastructure as a service cloud managers into two different options or types of solutions we have orchestration based solutions and then what i define as pure cloud managers orchestration solutions are solutions that are built on
legacy data center automation tools like hp's orchestration product novell has an orchestration product and dell just recently acquired me about a year ago a orchestration solution so orchestration solutions are solutions that are geared towards really large data centers and automating or automating actions that could be scripted such as the provisioning of let's say a hundred servers uh the provisioning of storage two servers anything that you can think of that a large data center would have to do time and time again and that would quite normally
require hands-on support to do these solutions kind of take that out of the mix and allow you to uh automate the data center those are really great solutions and what these companies have done have basically taken these solutions and bolted a cloud manager interface on top of those solutions to allow you to have that automation as well as those components of a cloud manager that we need to offer shared infrastructures uh to a cloud a set of cloud customers uh on the other side of spectrum
we have what i would like to call pure cloud manager so eucalyptus open stat cloud stack these are solutions that are built specifically from the ground up to be cloud managers uh very similar when you look at the the objectives they have very similar objectives they want to meet those five criteria of a cloud environment but they approach it in a different way because they built the applications with the ideal of providing cloud-based services and not just data center orchestration so what are some of the
offerings in cloud managers we have vcloud or vmware's vcloud director which obviously only supports uh all vmware hypervisor environment so if you want to leverage uh less expensive hypervisors such as kvm or uh your included licensing with hyper-v vcloud or vcloud director is really not a big option for you a solution that we don't have much about anymore eucalyptus eucalyptus is a very mature open source product that also has a paid for option cloud stack again a lot of news and uh a lot of recent
news on citrix leaving the openstack uh camp and joining the cloud stack solution openstack which is the originally rackspace sponsored open source product you can go to virtualized geek to read about both the cloud stack and openstack uh solutions the novell uh solution which is now been required acquired by a new company but they still have their solution out then a solution by a smaller company called abiquo which is a multi hypervisor solution uh that had at one time a open source project but i think
in the past year and a half i haven't seen that project man able to be downloaded all of the all of these solutions with the accession of vcloud provide support for multiple hypervisors so eucalyptus cloud stack openstack novell and avaco all offer cross platform hypervisor solutions i want to caveat that with a couple of the solutions that are open source the apoc open source solution uh or at least the open source solution that they had on a market a while back ago in the eucalyptus solution
as well as the novell solution uh have open source type models but if you want to support vsphere you most definitely have to go with the paid model cloud stack and openstack on the other hand are completely open source uh solutions both of which if you're needing to roll a cloud today you'll have to spend some development dollars if you're planning on rolling a private cloud or your own public or hybrid cloud you'll have to spend some development dollars to get the cloud to where you
need it to be capability wise when we talked about all those features so that was the introduction to uh cloud managers and infrastructure as a service our continued conversations we'll continue these conversations on uh future conversations will be focused around storage and networking and will dabble a little bit into security as well again if you want to learn more about virtualization uh cloud computing or technology in general i encourage you to visit my website www.virtualized thanks
