Cloud management

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Cloud management is the management of cloud computing products and services.

Contents

Public clouds are managed by public cloud service providers, which include the public cloud environment’s servers, storage, networking and data center operations. [1] Users may also opt to manage their public cloud services with a third-party cloud management tool.

Users of public cloud services can generally select from three basic cloud provisioning categories:

Managing a private cloud requires software tools to help create a virtualized pool of compute resources, provide a self-service portal for end users and handle security, resource allocation, tracking and billing. [2] Management tools for private clouds tend to be service driven, as opposed to resource driven, because cloud environments are typically highly virtualized and organized in terms of portable workloads. [3]

In hybrid cloud environments, compute, network and storage resources must be managed across multiple domains, so a good management strategy should start by defining what needs to be managed, and where and how to do it. [4] Policies to help govern these domains should include configuration and installation of images, access control, and budgeting and reporting. [4] Access control often includes the use of Single sign-on (SSO), in which a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them.

Characteristics of Cloud Management

Cloud management combines software and technologies in a design for managing cloud environments. [5] Software developers have responded to the management challenges of cloud computing with a variety of cloud management platforms and tools. [6] These tools include native tools offered by public cloud providers as well as third-party tools designed to provide consistent functionality across multiple cloud providers. Administrators must balance the competing requirements of efficient consistency across different cloud platforms with access to different native functionality within individual cloud platforms. The growing acceptance of public cloud and increased multicloud usage is driving the need for consistent cross-platform management. Rapid adoption of cloud services is introducing a new set of management challenges for those technical professionals responsible for managing IT systems and services. [7]

Cloud-management platforms and tools should have the ability to provide minimum functionality in the following categories. Functionality can be both natively provided or orchestrated via third-party integration. [8]

Organizations may group these criteria into key use cases including Cloud Brokerage, DevOps Automation, Governance, and Day-2 Life Cycle Operations. [8]

Enterprises with large-scale cloud implementations may require more robust cloud management tools which include specific characteristics, such as the ability to manage multiple platforms from a single point of reference, or intelligent analytics to automate processes like application lifecycle management. High-end cloud management tools should[ original research? ] also have the ability to handle system failures automatically with capabilities such as self-monitoring, an explicit notification mechanism, and include failover and self-healing capabilities.

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Management Challenges

Legacy management infrastructures, which are based on the concept of dedicated system relationships and architecture constructs, are not well suited to cloud environments where instances are continually launched and decommissioned. [9] Instead, the dynamic nature of cloud computing requires monitoring and management tools that are adaptable, extensible and customizable. [10] [11]

Cloud computing presents a number of management challenges. [6] Companies using public clouds do not have ownership of the equipment hosting the cloud environment, and because the environment is not contained within their own networks, public cloud customers do not have full visibility or control. [10] Users of public cloud services must also integrate with an architecture defined by the cloud provider, using its specific parameters for working with cloud components. Integration includes tying into the cloud APIs for configuring IP addresses, subnets, firewalls and data service functions for storage. Because control of these functions is based on the cloud provider’s infrastructure and services, public cloud users must integrate with the cloud infrastructure management. [12]

Capacity management is a challenge for both public and private cloud environments because end users have the ability to deploy applications using self-service portals. Applications of all sizes may appear in the environment, consume an unpredictable amount of resources, then disappear at any time. [13] A possible solution is profiling the applications impact on computational resources. As result, the performance models allow the prediction of how resource utilization changes according to application patterns. Thus, resources can be dynamically scaled to meet the expected demand. This is critical to cloud providers that need to provision resources quickly to meet a growing demand by their applications. [14]

Charge-back—or, pricing resource use on a granular basis—is a challenge for both public and private cloud environments. [15] Charge-back is a challenge for public cloud service providers because they must price their services competitively while still creating profit. [13] Users of public cloud services may find charge-back challenging because it is difficult for IT groups to assess actual resource costs on a granular basis due to overlapping resources within an organization that may be paid for by an individual business unit, such as electrical power. [15] For private cloud operators, charge-back is fairly straightforward, but the challenge lies in guessing how to allocate resources as closely as possible to actual resource usage to achieve the greatest operational efficiency. Exceeding budgets can be a risk. [13]

Hybrid cloud environments, which combine public and private cloud services, sometimes with traditional infrastructure elements, present their own set of management challenges. These include security concerns if sensitive data lands on public cloud servers, budget concerns around overuse of storage or bandwidth and proliferation of mismanaged images. [4] Managing the information flow in a hybrid cloud environment is also a significant challenge. On-premises clouds must share information with applications hosted off-premises by public cloud providers, and this information may change constantly. [16] Hybrid cloud environments also typically include a complex mix of policies, permissions and limits that must be managed consistently across both public and private clouds. [16]

Cloud Management Platforms (CMP)

CMPs provide a means for a cloud service customer to manage the deployment and operation of applications and associated datasets across multiple cloud service infrastructures, including both on-premises cloud infrastructure and public cloud service provider infrastructure. In other words, CMPs provide management capabilities for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. [17]

A cloud management platform (CMP) provides broad cloud management functionality atop both public cloud provider platforms and private cloud platforms. CMPs manage cloud services and resources that are distributed across multiple cloud platforms. The value of CMPs stands in delivering the maximum level of consistency between platforms without compromising depth of functionality. Unfortunately, the meaning of the term "cloud management platform" (CMP) has evolved over the past decade so that the precise meaning of this term is often unclear in discussions of management strategy. One vendor using this term may mean something completely different from another. Selecting the right management approach for cloud services is therefore a complex task. Providers and vendors can further confuse the evaluation by highlighting only their strengths and avoiding their weaknesses. Furthermore, each provider and vendor focuses on solving different aspects of cloud management, making it difficult to compare solutions. [8]

A minimum viable CMP must be able to provide support for all technology stack layers and orchestrate capabilities across them (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, etc.) It must include a cloud-agnostic tool to support portability/migration to and across hybrid clouds. An integration framework will take advantage of existing automation tools used internally and combine these with new CMP features. The ability to provide native container support across virtual technologies is a prerequisite, and CMPs are now either container ‘native’ (architected using containers) or being reengineered to support containers. Along with standard OS deployments, a CMP’s blueprinting function will enable administrators to create and provide image-based solutions and customized configurations. Integration with other IT assets and databases (CMDB) and role-based access control and governance are key. [18]

As a consolidated control plane for IT operations, one of the primary roles of a CMP is the integration of existing application lifecycle tools, hypervisors, and cloud platforms. Given that charter, CMPs must integrate with internal and external systems to manage multi-cloud services. The ability to support both published APIs and provide for customization, if needed, is a critical capability. [17]

Key areas of integration include:

Cloud Services Brokerages

Like any other brokerage firm, a Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) manages cloud services for clients. Gartner explains that CSBs play an intermediary role in the cloud computing management process. [19] Since there are many Datacenters hosting the provided applications, the role of a service broker becomes very important in choosing the most suitable data center to serve the received request. [20] Cloud services brokerages consolidate cloud services from one or more sources and allow customers to access these services through one portal.

See also

Related Research Articles

In telecommunications, provisioning involves the process of preparing and equipping a network to allow it to provide new services to its users. In National Security/Emergency Preparedness telecommunications services, "provisioning" equates to "initiation" and includes altering the state of an existing priority service or capability.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model where a cloud services vendor provides computing resources such as storage, network, servers, and virtualization. This service frees users from maintaining their own data center, but they must install and maintain the operating system and application software. Iaas provides users high-level APIs to control details of underlying network infrastructure such as backup, data partitioning, scaling, security and physical computing resources. Services can be scaled on-demand by the user. According to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), such infrastructure is the most basic cloud-service model. IaaS can be hosted in a public cloud, a private cloud, or a hybrid cloud.

Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a cloud computing service model where users provision, instantiate, run and manage a modular bundle of a computing platform and applications, without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure associated with developing and launching application(s), and to allow developers to create, develop, and package such software bundles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud computing</span> Form of shared internet-based computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.

If a software product is offered as Hybrid SaaS or Hybrid Cloud, it means that it combines elements of both Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises software deployment models.

Eucalyptus is a paid and open-source computer software for building Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible private and hybrid cloud computing environments, originally developed by the company Eucalyptus Systems. Eucalyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. Eucalyptus enables pooling compute, storage, and network resources that can be dynamically scaled up or down as application workloads change. Mårten Mickos was the CEO of Eucalyptus. In September 2014, Eucalyptus was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and then maintained by DXC Technology. After DXC stopped developing the product in late 2017, AppScale Systems forked the code and started supporting Eucalyptus customers.

IBM was a 2009 project using the resources developed in 2007's IBM/Google Cloud Computing partnership. This initiative was to provide access to cloud computing for the universities of all countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenNebula</span> Cloud-computing platform for managing heterogeneous distributed infrastructure

OpenNebula is an open source cloud computing platform for managing heterogeneous data center, public cloud and edge computing infrastructure resources. OpenNebula manages on-premises and remote virtual infrastructure to build private, public, or hybrid implementations of Infrastructure as a Service and multi-tenant Kubernetes deployments. The two primary uses of the OpenNebula platform are data center virtualization and cloud deployments based on the KVM hypervisor, LXD/LXC system containers, and AWS Firecracker microVMs. The platform is also capable of offering the cloud infrastructure necessary to operate a cloud on top of existing VMware infrastructure. In early June 2020, OpenNebula announced the release of a new Enterprise Edition for corporate users, along with a Community Edition. OpenNebula CE is free and open-source software, released under the Apache License version 2. OpenNebula CE comes with free access to patch releases containing critical bug fixes but with no access to the regular EE maintenance releases. Upgrades to the latest minor/major version is only available for CE users with non-commercial deployments or with significant open source contributions to the OpenNebula Community. OpenNebula EE is distributed under a closed-source license and requires a commercial Subscription.

HP Cloud Service Automation is cloud management software from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) that is used by companies and government agencies to automate the management of cloud-based IT-as-a-service, from order, to provision, and retirement. HP Cloud Service Automation orchestrates the provisioning and deployment of complex IT services such as of databases, middleware, and packaged applications. The software speeds deployment of application-based services across hybrid cloud delivery platforms and traditional IT environments.

HP Business Service Automation was a collection of software products for data center automation from the HP Software Division of Hewlett-Packard Company. The products could help Information Technology departments create a common, enterprise-wide view of each business service; enable the automation of change and compliance across all devices that make up a business service; connect IT processes and coordinate teams via common workflows; and integrate with monitoring and ticketing tools to form a complete, integrated business service management solution. HP now provides many of these capabilities as part of HP Business Service Management software and solutions.

Cloud manufacturing (CMfg) is a new manufacturing paradigm developed from existing advanced manufacturing models and enterprise information technologies under the support of cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), virtualization and service-oriented technologies, and advanced computing technologies. It transforms manufacturing resources and manufacturing capabilities into manufacturing services, which can be managed and operated in an intelligent and unified way to enable the full sharing and circulating of manufacturing resources and manufacturing capabilities. CMfg can provide safe and reliable, high quality, cheap and on-demand manufacturing services for the whole lifecycle of manufacturing. The concept of manufacturing here refers to big manufacturing that includes the whole lifecycle of a product.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenShift</span> Cloud computing software

OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — a hybrid cloud platform as a service built around Linux containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The family's other products provide this platform through different environments: OKD serves as the community-driven upstream, Several deployment methods are available including self-managed, cloud native under ROSA, ARO and RHOIC on AWS, Azure, and IBM Cloud respectively, OpenShift Online as software as a service, and OpenShift Dedicated as a managed service.

HP ConvergedSystem is a portfolio of system-based products from Hewlett-Packard (HP) that integrates preconfigured IT components into systems for virtualization, cloud computing, big data, collaboration, converged management, and client virtualization. Composed of servers, storage, networking, and integrated software and services, the systems are designed to address the cost and complexity of data center operations and maintenance by pulling the IT components together into a single resource pool so they are easier to manage and faster to deploy. Where previously it would take three to six months from the time of order to get a system up and running, it now reportedly takes as few as 20 days with the HP ConvergedSystem.

HP CloudSystem is a cloud infrastructure from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) that combines storage, servers, networking and software.

openQRM is a free and open-source cloud-computing management platform for managing heterogeneous data centre infrastructures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HP Cloud</span> Set of cloud computing services

HP Cloud was a set of cloud computing services available from Hewlett-Packard. It was the combination of the previous HP Converged Cloud business unit and HP Cloud Services, an OpenStack-based public cloud. It was marketed to enterprise organizations to combine public cloud services with internal IT resources to create hybrid clouds, or a mix of private and public cloud environments, from around 2011 to 2016.

Cloud-based integration is a form of systems integration business delivered as a cloud computing service that addresses data, process, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and application integration.

Cloud computing is used by most people every day, but there are issues that limit its widespread adoption. It is one of the fast developing area that can instantly supply extensible services by using internet with the help of hardware and software virtualization. Cloud computing biggest advantage is flexible lease and release of resources as per the requirement of the user. Its other advantages include efficiency, compensating the costs in operations and management. It curtails down the high prices of hardware and software

"X as a service" is a phrasal template for any business model in which a product use is offered as a subscription-based service rather than as an artifact owned and maintained by the customer. Originating from the software as a service concept that appeared in the 2010s with the advent of cloud computing, the template has expanded to numerous offerings in the field of information technology and beyond it. The term XaaS can mean "anything as a service".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oracle Cloud</span> Cloud computing service

Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation managed data centers. The company allows these services to be provisioned on demand over the Internet.

References

  1. ↑ Gens, Frank. (2008-09-23) “Defining ‘Cloud Services’ and ‘Cloud Computing’,” IDC Exchange. Archived 2010-07-22 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ↑ Henderson, Tom and Allen, Brendan. (2010-12-20) “Private clouds: Not for the faint of heart”, NetworkWorld.
  3. ↑ Whitehead, Richard. (2010-04-19) “A Guide to Managing Private Clouds,” Industry Perspectives.
  4. 1 2 3 Sullivan, Dan. (2011–02) “Hybrid cloud management tools and strategies,” SearchCloudComputing.com
  5. ↑ "Definition: Cloud management", ITBusinessEdge/Webopedia
  6. 1 2 S. Garcia-Gomez; et al. (2012). "Challenges for the comprehensive management of Cloud Services in a PaaS framework". Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience. 13 (3). Scientific International Journal for Parallel and Distributed Computing: 201–213.
  7. ↑ "A Guidance Framework for Selecting Cloud Management Platforms and Tools". www.gartner.com. Retrieved 2018-11-26.
  8. 1 2 3 "Evaluation Criteria for Cloud Management Platforms and Tools". www.gartner.com. Retrieved 2018-11-26.
  9. ↑ Cole, Arthur. (2013-01-13) “Cloud Management, Front and Center,” ITBusinessEdge. Archived 2018-12-02 at the Wayback Machine
  10. 1 2 Lee, Anne. (2012-01-24) “Cloud Computing: How It Affects Enterprise and Performance Monitoring,” Sys-Con Media
  11. ↑ Menychtas, Andreas; Santzaridou, Christina; Kousiouris, George; Varvarigou, Theodora; Orue-Echevarria, Leire; Alonso, Juncal; Gorronogoitia, Jesus; Bruneliere, Hugo; Strauss, Oliver; Senkova, Tatiana; Pellens, Bram; Stuer, Peter (2013), "ARTIST Methodology and Framework: A Novel Approach for the Migration of Legacy Software on the Cloud" (PDF), 2013 15th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing, 15th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC), IEEE, pp. 424–431, doi:10.1109/SYNASC.2013.62, ISBN   978-1-4799-3036-4, S2CID   8150975
  12. ↑ Linthicum, David. (2011-04-27) “How to integrate with the cloud”, InfoWorld: Cloud Computing, April 27, 2011.
  13. 1 2 3 Semple, Bryan. (2011-07-14) “Five Capacity Management Challenges for Private Clouds,” Cloud Computing Journal. Archived 2014-03-27 at the Wayback Machine
  14. ↑ Magalhaes, Deborah et al. (2015-09-19) “Workload modeling for resource usage analysis and simulation in cloud computing,” Computers & Electrical Engineering
  15. 1 2 Golden, Barnard. (2010-11-05) “Cloud Computing: Why You Can't Ignore Chargeback,” CIO.com. Archived 2013-12-21 at the Wayback Machine
  16. 1 2 Rigsby, Josette. (2011-08-30) “IBM Offers New Hybrid Cloud Solution Using Cast Iron, Tivoli,” CMS Wire.
  17. 1 2 Mike Edwards, Preetam Gawade, John Leung, Bill McDonald, Karolyn Schalk, Karl Scott, Bill Van Order, Steven Woodward (2017). "Practical Guide to Cloud Management Platforms". Cloud Standards Customer Council.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  18. ↑ Fellows, William (June 2018). "451 Research Cloud Management Market Map". 451 Research Report Excerpt.
  19. ↑ "Cloud Computing". www.gartner.com. Retrieved 28 May 2015.
  20. ↑ Gamal, Selim; Rowayda A. Sadek; Hend Taha (January 2014). "An Efficient Cloud Service Broker Algorithm". International Journal of Advancements in Computing Technology. 6 (1).
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