cloud-for-dummies.pdf

 Cloud Services FOR DUMmIES ‰ IBM LIMITED EDITION by Judith Hurwitz, Marci...

 Cloud Services FOR DUMmIES ‰ IBM LIMITED EDITION by Judith Hurwitz, Marcia Kaufman, and Dr. Fern Halper These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Cloud Services For Dummies®, IBM Limited Edition Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774 www.wiley.com Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. 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ISBN: 978-1-118-33891-9 (pbk) 978-1-118-34012-7 (ebk) Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Table of Contents Introduction...................................... 1 About This Book......................................................................... 2 Foolish Assumptions.................................................................. 2 How This Book Is Organized..................................................... 3 Icons Used in This Book............................................................. 4 Chapter 1: Understanding Cloud Fundamentals and the Cloud Continuum........................ 5 Discovering Cloud Basics.......................................................... 6 Foundational Cloud Delivery Services..................................... 6 Core Cloud Capabilities............................................................. 8 Elasticity and self-service provisioning......................... 8 Billing and metering of service usage............................ 9 Workload management.................................................... 9 Management services....................................................... 9 Understanding the Cloud Continuum.................................... 10 Open community clouds................................................ 12 Controlled open mode................................................... 12 Contractual open............................................................ 13 Public/private hybrid clouds........................................ 13 Chapter 2: Digging Deeper into IaaS and PaaS....... 15 Diving into Infrastructure as a Service................................... 16 Listing the characteristics of IaaS................................ 16 Renting................................................................... 17 Self-service provisioning..................................... 17 Dynamic scaling.................................................... 17 Service levels........................................................ 17 Licensing................................................................ 18 Metering................................................................. 18 Considering a private IaaS............................................. 18 Knowing how companies use IaaS................................ 19 Exploring PaaS........................................................................... 20 Variations in PaaS delivery models.............................. 21 Understanding the benefits of PaaS............................. 22 Having the Correct Requirements for IaaS and PaaS............. 23 These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. iv Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition Chapter 3: Diving into Cloud Economics............. 25 Developing an Economic Strategy.......................................... 26 Comparing traditional models with the cloud............ 26 Finding the value............................................................ 27 Exploring the Costs.................................................................. 29 What you save or gain with cloud services................. 32 Cost calculating.............................................................. 32 Assessing workloads............................................ 33 Using a cost estimator tool................................. 33 Chapter 4: Managing Cloud Workloads and Services.................................. 35 Understanding Workloads....................................................... 36 Looking at Workload Use Cases.............................................. 37 Analytics workload......................................................... 37 Batch workloads............................................................. 38 Looking at the Principles of Workload Management........... 39 Seeing Workload Management in a Hybrid Cloud................ 39 Connecting Workloads in the Cloud....................................... 40 The importance of APIs................................................. 41 A standard workload layer............................................ 41 Portability of workloads................................................ 42 Managing and Monitoring Workloads.................................... 42 Tracking workloads........................................................ 43 Asking the right questions............................................. 43 Chapter 5: Improving Security, Governance, and Cloud Reliability........................... 45 Finding out Why Cloud Security Matters............................... 45 Establishing a Cloud Governance Strategy............................ 48 Governance issues in the cloud.................................... 48 Risks worth noting.......................................................... 49 Making cloud governance work.................................... 50 Managing Service Levels.......................................................... 50 Developing a Secure, Accountable, and Reliable Cloud Environment................................................ 52 Assessing your current state........................................ 53 Implementing security best practices......................... 54 These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Table of Contents v Chapter 6: Starting Your Cloud Journey............. 55 Integrating Your Business, IT, and Cloud Strategies............ 56 Getting Started with IaaS and PaaS......................................... 57 Private IaaS for development and test......................... 57 Public IaaS for development and test.......................... 57 Public PaaS for architecting new business models.... 58 Private PaaS for delivering new services..................... 58 Accelerating the Company’s Momentum............................... 58 Gaining IT acceptance.................................................... 59 Managing cloud services............................................... 59 Planning the Successful Journey............................................ 60 Business considerations................................................ 61 How’s the business changing?............................ 61 How does the company want to provide services in the future?....................... 61 What are the financial constraints for the company?.............................................. 62 Is the company too siloed for the strategy?..... 62 Is there an easy mechanism to encourage experimentation and innovation?................... 62 Implementation considerations.................................... 62 Evaluating reference architectures.................... 62 Focusing on efficiency and flexibility................. 63 Planning for a fabric of services......................... 63 Assuming that you’ll plan for a lightweight approach.................................... 63 Monitored and managing everything you do.... 63 Transforming IT with Cloud.................................................... 63 These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Introduction W elcome to Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition. Whether public, private, or hybrid, cloud computing is becoming an increasingly integral part of many companies’ business and technology strategy. Cloud services help companies turn IT resources into a flexible, elastic, and self-service set of resources that they can more easily manage and scale to support changing business needs. While many different delivery models for cloud computing services exist, two foundational services are a requirement for making cloud computing into a strategic part of an overall computing infrastructure. These include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). IaaS is the services that enable you to gain access to compute and storage resources in an on demand model. PaaS is the services that sit on top of IaaS and enable you to build applications to support the business. No matter what your plan for your evolving IT infrastructure may be, you can take advantage of these services in combination with on-premises platforms to create flexibility for the business. Cloud computing serves different needs for different constituents within your organization. For business leaders, cloud computing is a cost-effective way to leverage IT resources to prototype and implement strategic change. For your IT organization, the cloud is a platform that allows it to be significantly more proactive and responsive when it comes to supporting strategic business imperatives. While IT is leading the charge in focusing on best practices that support the balanced use of public, private, and data center resources — the emerging world of hybrid computing — don’t lose sight of the fact that cloud is just as much about business model transformation as it is about technology transformation. In fact, many companies find that the cloud helps to support increased collaboration between business and IT leaders enabling them to more quickly adjust to changing market dynamics. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 2 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition About This Book This book gives you some insights into what it means to leverage both IaaS and PaaS in both public and private cloud environments and how these environments work with data center services. Companies leveraging these foundational cloud services need to keep all the models in context with business requirements for performance, security, and portability. This book helps put the foundational cloud services — IaaS and PaaS into context. In addition, the topics covered in this book are critical to the success of hybrid environments. Foolish Assumptions This book is useful to many people, but we have to admit that we did pick a segment of the world to focus on. Here’s who we think you are: ✓ You’re already using various forms of cloud computing and are planning a long-term strategy. Perhaps we’re preaching to the choir. You understand that the benefits of using all kinds of flexible cloud computing models represent sources of sustainable competitive advantage. ✓ You’re a business leader who wants IT resources to be a utility that’s optimized to leverage what you’ve already paid for. You want IT to serve your business needs — you want to be able to execute your strategy on your timetable. You want IT to be your partner in innovating for the future. ✓ You’re an IT leader who knows a lot about technology but aren’t sure precisely how cloud computing — public, private, or a combination of the two as a hybrid model — works. You need to understand how cloud computing changes IT and what you need to do to support the business with cloud computing as an important enabler. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Introduction 3 How This Book Is Organized This book isn’t intended to be an exhaustive technical manual on implementing and managing cloud computing. Instead, we give you a taste of the concepts and approaches you need to consider when embarking on your journey to the hybrid cloud. We’ve organized this book into six chapters: ✓ Chapter 1 gives you an overview of the business case for foundational cloud services — what it means to the business and how these services support the overall IT approach. ✓ Chapter 2 provides you with an understanding of the technical foundation for IaaS and PaaS. The chapter includes use cases that explain the business benefits to the organization. ✓ Chapter 3 delves into the economics of cloud services. The chapter explains the type of economic benefit you gain from using foundational cloud services and how they support changing business requirements. ✓ Chapter 4 provides an overview of managing cloud workloads and services. Many different types of workloads need to be supported in the cloud. This chapter presents the different workloads and how they need to be managed to support IT and business needs. ✓ Chapter 5 provides insights into the important issue of security, governance, and cloud reliability. What does it mean to have a secure cloud and how do you ensure that your assets are safe? How do you have the right level of support for governance rules that keeps your company safe and in compliance? ✓ Chapter 6 gives you a roadmap for planning your journey to the hybrid cloud from a best practices perspective. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 4 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition Icons Used in This Book The following icons are used to point out important information throughout the book: Tips help identify information that needs special attention. Pay attention to these common pitfalls of managing your foundational cloud. This icon highlights important information that you should remember. This icon contains tidbits for the more technically inclined. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 1 Understanding Cloud Fundamentals and the Cloud Continuum In This Chapter ▶ Understanding the essentials of cloud computing ▶ Exploring the cloud continuum ▶ Examining foundational delivery services H ow quickly things change. Cloud computing has evolved from a risky and confusing concept to a strategy that organizations large and small are beginning to adopt as part of their overall computing strategy. Companies are now starting to ask not whether they should think about cloud computing but what types of cloud computing models are best suited to solve their business problems. Not only are organizations using the cloud for services such as e-mail or customer relationship management, but also many are utilizing a set of important cloud foundational services — Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) — to develop and deploy applications to support the business and open up new innovative opportunities and new revenue streams. The kind of cloud deployment you should consider depends on your own particular performance, security requirements, and your specific business goals. In this chapter, you look at the fundamentals of cloud computing and the insights into the range of cloud services and models that you need to understand. It’s important to understand that there’s a These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 6 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition continuum of cloud services. These services range from an open and shared public environment to private cloud that’s tightly managed with the highest level of security and service. You also discover two key foundational cloud delivery models: IaaS and PaaS. In addition, Software as a Service (SaaS) provides packaged business process offerings that live in the cloud and leverage both IaaS and PaaS services. Discovering Cloud Basics Cloud computing is a method of providing a set of shared computing resources that includes applications, computing, storage, networking, development, and deployment platforms as well as business processes. Cloud computing turns traditional siloed computing assets into shared pools of resources that are based on an underlying Internet foundation. Clouds come in different versions, depending on your needs. There are two primary deployment models of cloud: public and private. Most organizations use a combination of private computing resources (data centers and private clouds) and public services as a hybrid environment. These clouds are covered in more detail throughout this chapter. The cloud doesn’t exist in isolation to other corporate IT investments. The reality is that most companies use a combination of public and private cloud services in conjunction with their data center. Companies use different methods, depending on their business requirements to link and integrate these services. The way you construct your hybrid computing environment is determined by the complexity of the workloads and how you want to optimize the performance of those workloads to support your constituents. Foundational Cloud Delivery Services Understanding the foundations of cloud computing calls for understanding three main cloud delivery models: These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Chapter 1: Understanding Cloud Fundamentals and the Cloud Continuum 7 ✓ IaaS: The delivery of services such as hardware, software, storage, networking, data center space, and various utility software elements on request. Both public and private versions of IaaS exist. In the public IaaS, the user needs a simple sign-up mechanism to acquire resources. When users no longer need the resources, they simply de-provision them. In a private IaaS, the IT organization or an integrator creates an infrastructure designed to provide resources on demand to internal users and sometimes partners. IaaS is the fundamental element used by other cloud models. Some customers bring their own tools and software to create applications. ✓ PaaS: A mechanism for combining IaaS with an abstracted set of middleware services, software development, and deployment tools that allow the organization to have a consistent way to create and deploy applications on a cloud or on-premises environment. A PaaS environment supports coordination between the developer and the operations organization, typically called DevOps. A PaaS offers a consistent set of programming and middleware services that ensure developers have a well-tested and well-integrated way to create applications in a cloud environment. A PaaS requires an infrastructure service. ✓ SaaS: A business application created and hosted by a provider in a multi-tenant (shared) model. The SaaS application sits on top of both a PaaS and foundational IaaS. In fact, a SaaS environment can be built directly on an IaaS platform. Typically these underlying services aren’t visible to end-users of a SaaS application. A hybrid cloud combines private cloud services with public cloud services where one or several touch points are between the environments. What does this mean? If a few developers in a company use a public cloud service to prototype a new application that’s completely disconnected from the private cloud or the data center, the company doesn’t have a hybrid These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 8 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition environment. On the other hand, a cloud is hybrid when a company uses public cloud services for tasks such as prototyping or testing a new application. When the application is completed it may be moved to the private cloud. In another situation, the Web servers are on a public cloud service that’s integrated with payment systems that are run in a private cloud. A company with a private cloud may choose to combine some public services for capabilities that are commodities with private services based on the ability to deliver fast innovation to their ecosystem. For example, companies are increasingly discovering that it’s practical to pay a per-user, per-year price for customer relationship management (CRM) and leave the day-to-day management to a trusted vendor. But many companies also want to keep control over some of their most sensitive data. Therefore, they may choose to keep data about prospects on a public cloud. However, after those prospects become customers, the companies may begin storing that data on their own premises in their own servers, which is the hybrid cloud model. Core Cloud Capabilities Regardless of the model that you use, some core capabilities that are essential in the cloud environment include the areas covered in this section. Elasticity and self-service provisioning A key feature of a cloud environment is that it provides a platform that’s designed to be elastic (you can use just the resources you want when you need them), so the users/ customers provision resources, such as computing or storage resources, that they pay for on a per-unit basis. When the user no longer needs that resource and stops paying, the resource is released back into the pool of resources. This helps organizations avoid the cost of idle computing resources. Instead of purchasing, managing, and maintaining a server environment, for example, a business can purchase computing on demand, avoiding capital expenditures. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Chapter 1: Understanding Cloud Fundamentals and the Cloud Continuum 9 The term self-service is important here too. With self-service, the developer of an application, for example, is able to use a browser or portal interface to acquire appropriate resources needed to build or operate an application. This just-in-time model is a more efficient way to ensure that the IT organization can be responsive to business change. Billing and metering of service usage A cloud service has to provide a way to measure and meter a service. Consequently a cloud environment includes a built-in service that tracks how many resources a customer uses. In a public cloud, customers are charged for units of resources consumed. In a private cloud, IT management may implement a charge back mechanism for departments leveraging services. Workload management The cloud is a federated (distributed) environment that pools resources so they can work together. Making this happen requires that these resources be optimized to work as though they were an integrated well-tuned environment comprised of a variety of workloads. A workload is an independent service or collection of code that can be executed. It’s important in the cloud that workloads be designed to support the right task with the right cloud services. For example, some workloads need to be placed in a private cloud because they require fast transaction management and a high level of security. Other workloads may not be so mission critical and can be placed in a public cloud. Management services Many management services are mandatory for ensuring that cloud computing is a well-managed platform. Security and governance are key services to ensure that your applications and data are protected. Data management is also critical because data may be moving between cloud environments. All of these services have to be managed and monitored to ensure that an organization’s level of service is maintained. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 10 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition Understanding the Cloud Continuum Meeting the needs of businesses requires that IT provide a variety of different types of cloud services. Understanding the characteristics of a continuum of cloud services helps you understand what’s required to meet certain business goals. All cloud environments aren’t equal. Therefore, you need to understand the different types of cloud models available to support the business. Your decision of what type of cloud service to select is based first and foremost on your security and service level requirements. It may be straightforward to assume that all public clouds are the same and all private clouds work in the same way. But in reality there are shades of gray. For example, you may have a public cloud service that’s only available to customers who sign a long-term agreement. You may have a private cloud that’s an evolution of your data center. Some public clouds may offer a sophisticated level of security offerings while other public clouds have virtually no security at all. Ultimately, you need to select the type of cloud service that provides use of the right resources at the right time with the right level of security and governance. The continuum of cloud services, depicted in Figure 1-1, includes both public and private services that meet different needs within an organization. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Chapter 1: Understanding Cloud Fundamentals and the Cloud Continuum 11 Figure 1-1: The cloud services continuum. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 12 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition Open community clouds The most open type of cloud environment is an open community cloud — a cloud environment that doesn’t require any criteria for joining other than signing up and creating a password. These environments may be privately or publicly owned and include social networking environments, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. There are also open community sites that enable individuals with a common interest to participate in online discussions. For example, there may be a community of professionals in a certain industry that want to share ideas. These open community sites generally involve a relatively simple sign-up process, although some of the more sophisticated sites request additional information from you. These sites also generally have a low level of security. Therefore, it’s relatively simple for someone inside or outside the open community to penetrate a user’s secure area. In addition, these sites generally don’t offer service level guar- antees to the user. Sites that are advertising-driven typically spend more effort on security and service level management. Controlled open mode Some public clouds offer a higher level of service because they’re true commercial environments. Commercial public clouds are those environments that are open for use by any one at any time, but these clouds are based on a pay-per-use model. For example, a SaaS vendor that charges per-user- per-month (or per-year) is one example of this kind of environment. In addition, vendors can offer analytics as a service to customers on a per-use or per-task basis. Because companies offering commercial public clouds are providing a commercial service, they provide a higher level of security and protection than the open community sites. These services generally have a written service level agreement (SLA) — an agreement outlining the obligation of the provider to the consumer of the service. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Chapter 1: Understanding Cloud Fundamentals and the Cloud Continuum 13 Contractual open Public cloud vendors sometimes productize offerings. Here the user can’t simply create login credentials, provide a credit card, and start using the service. Instead, the user actually signs a contract for service. The term can be as short as a month, or more typically a year. Vendors are also offering public IaaS and PaaS public platforms that are based on a formal contractual basis. In this kind of environment, the expectation is for a high level of security, privacy, and governance. These vendors provide a written SLA. Because of the service and security guarantees of this model, some customers may be willing to store critical data in the cloud. Public/private hybrid clouds Companies often want the flexibility of the cloud but with the security and predictability of the data center. In these cases, a private cloud provides an environment that sits behind a fire- wall. Unlike a data center, a private cloud is a pool of common resources optimized for the use of the IT organization. Unlike a public cloud, a private cloud adheres to the company’s security, governance and compliance requirements. Whatever service level is required for the company applies to the pri- vate cloud. There are two different types of private clouds: ✓ A private cloud owned and managed by a company for the benefit of its employees and partners ✓ A commercial private cloud resides in a vendor’s data center and provides a secure connection to the customer’s other IT resources. This approach securely augments a customer’s IT environment. In some instances, companies use a combination of public and private cloud services. A retail company may have a private cloud to support its highly distributed development These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 14 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition organization, and it may also use a SaaS HR public cloud application. In addition, to support its online commerce system, the company may leverage public commercial cloud services to ensure that customer service remains satisfactory during times of peak use, such as holidays. The same company might also create a private cloud application that it makes available to partners linking to its online sites. This type of hybrid environment will become the standard way companies run IT in the future. A company will typically use public cloud services such as SaaS to support customer relationship management, IaaS to add capacity on demand, and PaaS to support an experiment development process. This development makes sense because increasingly companies are looking for a cost-effective, flexible, and optimized environment to support internal operations, customers, partners, and suppliers. When a company selects this route, it takes the responsibility for the integration, security, manageability, and governance of the composite environment — including the public services that are included. In other words, IaaS and PaaS are foundational services that other cloud services will sit upon. IaaS itself is the foundation upon which PaaS can be utilized to build value. It supplies the infrastructure that developers can use to build applications. For example, many organizations are using IaaS and PaaS linked together for the development and operations process — which we will get into later in this book. These organizations may even be using IaaS and PaaS to build actual SaaS services. So, in some ways, IaaS services is the base of a pyramid with the infrastructure at the bottom, the middleware (PaaS) at the center, and the applications on top. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 2 Digging Deeper into IaaS and PaaS In This Chapter ▶ Understanding IaaS ▶ Diving into PaaS ▶ Defining the requirements for IaaS and PaaS I n this chapter, you look at Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) — two foundational cloud delivery services. Both of these services provide flexibility that enables companies to respond faster to their constituents’ needs. IaaS can serve two purposes: ✓ It can be a highly practical solution for companies that want access to resources in an on-demand manner. ✓ IaaS can also be used effectively to augment data center services, either to increase capacity when needed, to replace aging hardware with cloud-based services, or to provide ongoing access to sophisticated services, such as advanced analytics. A service model can enable a company to efficiently and effectively gain access to ongoing support as the business changes. In addition, IaaS can allow the business to freely experiment with new innovative software approaches without impacting the budget. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 16 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition PaaS is a cloud delivery option that sits on top of IaaS to enable companies to take advantage of a unified and abstracted way of developing and deploying applications. PaaS hides the complexity of the underlying computing services from IT practitioners in order to streamline the application development life cycle and deployment process. Diving into Infrastructure as a Service IaaS, the most straightforward of the cloud delivery models, is the delivery of computing resources in the form of virtualized operating systems, workload management software, hardware, networking, and storage services. It may also include the delivery of operating systems and virtualization technology to manage the resources. IaaS provides compute power and storage services on demand. Instead of buying and installing the required resources in their traditional data center, companies rent these required resources as needed. This rental model can be implemented behind a company’s firewall or through a third-party service provider. See more information on renting in the section “Listing the characteristics of IaaS.” Virtualization is often used as a foundation of cloud computing. Virtualization separates resources and services from the underlying physical delivery environment. With this approach, you can create many virtual systems within a single physical system. A primary driver for virtualization is consolidating servers, which provides organizations with efficiency and potential cost savings. Listing the characteristics of IaaS IaaS has two types of services: ✓ A public service is designed so consumers in any size business can acquire services in a rental model. Some public cloud services are open to anyone with a credit card that pays per use. Other public cloud services are contractual and provide a higher level of service to the buyer. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 2: Digging Deeper into IaaS and PaaS 17 ✓ In contrast, private services are provided inside a company’s firewall, enabling IT management to provide a self-service portal for employees and partners to easily access approved services. Characteristics of both models are covered in this section. Renting When you purchase server and storage resources using IaaS services, you gain immediate access to the resources you need. You aren’t, however, renting the actual servers or other infrastructure. It’s not like a rental truck pulls up to your office to deliver the services. The physical components stay put in the infrastructure service provider’s data center. Within a private IaaS, renting takes on a different focus. Although you may not charge each user to access a resource, in the charge-back model, you can allocate usage fees to an individual department based on usage over a week, month, or year. Because of the flexibility of the IaaS model, the heaviest resource users can pay more than those who use fewer resources. Self-service provisioning Self-service provisioning is a key characteristic of IaaS that enables the user to obtain resources — such as servers and networking — through a self-service portal without relying on IT to provision these resources for them. The portal is similar to a banking ATM model that handles repetitive tasks easily through a self-service interface. Dynamic scaling Dynamic scaling occurs when resources can be automatically expanded or contracted based on the requirements of the workload or task. If users need more resources than expected, they can get them immediately. A provider or creator of IaaS typically optimizes the environment so the hardware, the operating system, and automation can support a huge number of workloads. Service levels Many consumers acquire capacity based on an on-demand model with no contract. In other situations, the consumer signs a contract for a specific amount of storage and/or These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 18 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition compute. A typical IaaS contract has some level of service guarantee. At the low end, a provider may state that the company will do its best to provide good service. Depending on the service and the price, you may contract for 99.999 percent availability. The level of service you require depends on the workloads you’re running. We talk more about service levels in Chapter 5. Licensing The use of public IaaS has led to innovations in licensing and payment models for software you want to run in your cloud environment (not the license between you and your cloud provider). For example, some IaaS and software providers have created the Bring Your Own License (BYOL) plan so you have a way to use your software in both traditional or cloud environments. Another option is Pay As You Go (PAYG), which generally integrates the software licenses with the on-demand infrastructure services. Metering Metering ensures that users are charged for the resources they request and use. This metering to assess the charges for the IaaS services begins when the instance is initiated and ends when the instance is terminated. In addition to the basic per-instance charge, the IaaS provider may include charges for storage, data transfer, and optional services like enhanced security, support, or advanced monitoring. Considering a private IaaS A company would choose a private IaaS over a public one for three compelling reasons: ✓ The company needs to control access because of security concerns. ✓ The company may require that business critical applications demonstrate predictable performance while minimizing risk. ✓ The company sees itself as a service provider to its customers and partners. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 2: Digging Deeper into IaaS and PaaS 19 A company selecting a private approach creates a pool of resources that can be standardized and easily reused by the IT organization to complete projects. Why standardize? In an IaaS service, IT projects are created in predictable ways. For example, a process may be designed to set up a test environment for code or provision storage to support an application. While certain nuances are different, 80 percent of the time the process within IaaS can be standardized. By standardizing these infrastructure services, the organization gains efficiencies, fewer inadvertent errors, and consistency in managing the development lifecycle. This is the same approach used by a public IaaS vendor to control its costs. Knowing how companies use IaaS Companies use IaaS for a variety of projects. Here are a few examples: ✓ A manufacturer needs a development infrastructure for its enterprise resource planning application. It decides to use a public IaaS service to provision development and test environments for the system in an “on demand” fashion. The public IaaS gives it the operational flexibility it needs to provision and de-provision infrastructure instead of constantly having to ask IT for server capacity. ✓ An insurance company needs a cost-effective compute infrastructure to run quarterly and yearly risk reports. During this peak time, its compute usage may be several times greater than normally would be needed. The insurance company doesn’t want to over-invest in capacity that’s only sporadically needed. It contracts with a secure public cloud IaaS to manage peak loads. ✓ A large retailer decides to deploy a private cloud IaaS to provide capacity on demand for its portfolio of retail applications that it offers as a service to a set of small retailers. It has its own in-house staff of application developers who often need more capacity than it has in its development environment for testing purposes. IaaS provides this compute capacity, as required. The different companies all realized critical benefits from using IaaS: These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 20 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition ✓ Flexibility to dynamically scale the environment to meet their needs ✓ Reduction in the need to build new IT infrastructure because of increase demands for resources ✓ Cost savings from eliminating capital expenditures on large systems that may be underutilized much of the year ✓ Almost limitless storage and compute power Exploring PaaS PaaS is another foundational service that provides an abstracted and integrated environment for the development, running, and management of applications. Often the PaaS is tightly integrated with IaaS services because it’s utilizing the underlying infrastructure provided by the IaaS. A primary benefit of a PaaS environment is that developers don’t have to be concerned with some of the lower-level details of the environment. PaaS vendors create a managed environment that brings together a combination of components that would’ve been managed separately in a traditional development environment. Services integrated in a PaaS environment include middleware (for example, software that allows independent software components to work together), operating systems, and development and deployment services to support software development and delivery. Some enterprises also become, in effect, a PaaS provider to their own internal developers. These organizations follow a similar process of applying best practices to standardize the services developers require to develop and deploy applications. The goal of the PaaS provider is to create an abstracted and repeatable process for the creation and deployment of high-quality applications. These applications are designed to be implemented in public or private cloud environments. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 2: Digging Deeper into IaaS and PaaS 21 Variations in PaaS delivery models PaaS comes in different shapes and sizes. If you’re using a public cloud-based PaaS, the vendor shoulders the responsibility of managing the middleware software resources and the overall development and deployment environment. If you decide to create your own PaaS environment, your organization is responsible for maintaining the right level of service. A public PaaS environment looks and acts very differently than your traditional development and deployment platform. For example ✓ Resources aren’t delivered as software in PaaS. Instead the PaaS environment is hosted so the third party is responsible for uptime performance and software updates. ✓ The development and delivery of services lives in the cloud instead of in a single system. ✓ Middleware and services have no installation and configuration because they’re an integral part of the PaaS platform. ✓ Because the PaaS is tightly coupled with IaaS services, it offers a consistent way to manage and optimize applications from development to deployment (DevOps). A private PaaS environment also looks and acts differently than your traditional development platform. Large enterprises may implement well-designed patterns and best practices to achieve efficiency and productivity gains and reduce software development and deployment costs. Increasingly software developers are becoming strategic partners for the business. To support this strategic role, development organizations are adopting new business practices including the following: These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 22 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition ✓ Application developers no longer operate as disconnected units making individualized selections for hardware and software development tools to fit each new project. ✓ Enterprise IT standardize on a framework for all developers to use to write their code. Understanding the benefits of PaaS Organizations can gain a few different benefits through a PaaS environment. For example, it’s possible to architect a private cloud environment so development and deployment services are integrated into the platform. This provides a similar benefit gained from a public PaaS but in a private environment. A private PaaS implementation can be designed to work in concert with public PaaS services. The benefits to using PaaS include the following: ✓ Improving the development life cycle: Effectively managing the application development life cycle can be challenging. For example, teams may be in different locations, with different objectives, and working on different platforms. When it comes time to integrate, test, and build the application, problems can arise because developers are working on different platforms with a different configuration than the operations team is working on. In another situation, some developers don’t have the latest version of the code. These same developers may also be using a different set of tools. A key benefit of an abstracted platform is that it supports the life cycle of the application. ✓ Eliminating the installation and operational burden from an organization: Traditionally, when a new application server or other middleware is introduced into an organization, IT must make sure that the middleware can access other services that are required to run that application. This requirement can cause friction between Development and Operations. With PaaS, these conflicts are minimized. Because the PaaS environment is designed in a modular, service-oriented These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 2: Digging Deeper into IaaS and PaaS 23 manner, components can be easily and automatically updated. When PaaS is provided by a third-party organization, those changes occur automatically without the user having to deal with the details. When PaaS is implemented in a private cloud, the IT organization can automate the process of updating a self-service interface to provision the most current services to the IT organization. ✓ Implementing standardization: PaaS enables development professionals and IT operations professionals to use the same services on the same platform. This approach takes away much of the misunderstanding that happens when the two teams with different responsibilities aren’t in sync. ✓ Having ease of service provisioning: A PaaS provides easy provisioning of development services including build, test, and repository services to help eliminate bottlenecks associated with non-standard environments. This in turn improves efficiency, reduces errors, and ensures consistency in the management of the development life cycle. Additionally, PaaS provides ease of provisioning in runtime services that include application runtime containers for staging, and running and scaling applications. PaaS has two fundamental parts: the platform and the service. The service is what can set the PaaS vendor apart from its competitors. The PaaS vendor continuously services and improves the software. As new updates and new configurations become available, the PaaS vendor can immediately push them to its customers. Having the Correct Requirements for IaaS and PaaS In many instances, a blurring of the lines of IaaS and PaaS occurs. In fact, many vendors are already offering IaaS as part of a PaaS solution. That’s something to consider when you put together your infrastructure and development plans. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 24 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition The key requirements for IaaS and PaaS include the following: ✓ A consistent platform that’s optimized to support a variety of workloads needed by customers ✓ An integrated stack of middleware optimized for automated deployment and management of heterogeneous workloads that dynamically adjusts ✓ Reliable, highly secure and scalable platform The continuum of the cloud rests on the reliability and security of the platforms used and the track record of the cloud provider to support customers’ demands. ✓ A choice of deployment models that support the right service level, quality of service, and security required to support constituents These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 3 Diving into Cloud Economics In This Chapter ▶ Forming an economic strategy ▶ Exploring the costs of the cloud M any companies today are expanding into cloud computing as a way to reduce the cost and complexity of delivering traditional IT services. But determining the best mix of public and private cloud services and data center services is complicated. You can’t simply add up specific costs and make a fast determination of what’s the best approach for your organization. Instead, you have to look at your business requirements for performance, availability, and security and the workloads that you need to support. A workload is an independent service or collection of code that can be executed. You have to look at services such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) in context with your business goals and the impact on the customer experience. In this chapter, you examine both the indirect value factors that affect the economics behind IaaS and PaaS models as well as the direct cost factors. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 26 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition Developing an Economic Strategy An organization typically has many different types of workloads to manage in its data center that may be better suited for a cloud environment. So, to optimize your economic benefit from the cloud, you must first have a good understanding of your workload requirements. Developing an economic strategy for the cloud can be a balancing act. Some workloads may be more suited to your data center. There are compelling reasons why others belong in the cloud. And, while most organizations can’t predict the actual costs of running any given service in a data center, looking at direct and indirect costs of moving to the cloud is important. Comparing traditional models with the cloud As companies move to consider a cloud model, they no doubt are looking at their traditional data center. So, here’s an important point: The data center doesn’t go away. After all, almost all medium-size and large companies run their own data center to support and operate their systems of record, including accounting systems, payroll, and human resource as well as industry specific applications. When you think about a traditional data center, you generally picture a centrally managed data center that contains all of a company’s applications and data. While initially the data center was well planned and architected, it has typically evolved over decades to be less streamlined. Today, the typical data center supports different hardware, architectures, operating systems, applications, and tools. Although IT has made the data center more efficient, organizations are taking a hard look at what workloads the centralized data center is well suited for. The reality is that the traditional data center is often best suited for a complex line of business applications. These applications are often These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 3: Diving into Cloud Economics 27 transaction-intensive and need to confirm and track the movement of financial transactions among customers, suppliers, and partners. Additionally, large, often highly customized systems of record are and will continue to be data center-based. These applications are typically tightly managed for corporate governance and compliance. The traditional data center is designed to manage applications, but the cloud is designed to manage homogeneous workload resources. Managing workloads is foundational for the cloud, and we discuss workloads more in Chapter 4. IaaS and PaaS models are intended to manage a pool of resources, which is a set of shared, configured services that are independent of a physical location. PaaS models can be optimized to manage a particular process, such as application management. In many situations, cloud service providers create a multi-tenant environment to support the deployment of these resources. Multi-tenancy enables the sharing of a service while keeping the data and configurations of individual customers separate, meaning that in an IaaS model, for example, you may be sharing server infrastructure with many other users (either internally in the private cloud or externally in the public cloud). This factor enables economies of scale for the cloud provider. Finding the value Operational performance, security, economics, and flexibility all have a great impact on an organization’s cloud strategy. Striking the right balance among public cloud services, private cloud, and the data center can come down to a mix of these factors or can be dominated by just one. Finding the right mixture of environments is critical for your organization to achieve the best value when creating a cloud strategy and determining which model may provide economic value. For example, a move to IaaS is likely to deliver an economic benefit if you have the need for increased capacity. This may take several forms: ✓ Say your organization is ramping up for a new but short- term initiative and you temporarily need some extra CPU capacity and storage. This may be a good match for an These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 28 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition IaaS service because building out a full infrastructure for unpredictable requirements isn’t economical. ✓ Organizations may have a continuing need for additional compute or storage resources over time and can use a private IaaS to make those resources available on demand for a variety of projects. For example, additional public or private resources may be required as hardware reaches end-of-service life. ✓ Some organizations are using IaaS for cloudbursting when there are unexpected or planned high-load periods. The flexibility of using IaaS means that the company doesn’t have to overinvest in hardware. These companies must be able to adapt to higher loads to protect themselves. In the case of PaaS, companies find that PaaS can offer value during development and deployment, instead of having to purchase many different tools. By providing the underlying software infrastructure, PaaS can reduce organizational costs. PaaS reduces many of the costs involved with the traditional application development and deployment model including server and storage overhead, operating systems, workload and performance management software, network bandwidth, software maintenance, and support personnel. However, there are also some indirect value drivers for PaaS. These include ✓ Reducing careless mistakes: Mistakes, such as someone forgetting to load a configuration file can take a week before the problem is identified. Such mistakes add up to time and money wasted and cause deployment delays. With PaaS, such mistakes are reduced because the platform has been tested and is known to work. These successful and well-understood patterns are an important benefit of a PaaS. ✓ Lowering skill requirements: Perhaps only one or two people in an organization have the skills necessary to work with a certain kind of middleware. By providing the development tools and middleware, PaaS lowers the skill level required to deploy applications and removes the bottleneck that can form waiting for one specific person’s assistance. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 3: Diving into Cloud Economics 29 ✓ Maintaining speed, flexibility, and agility: By providing a predictable, heterogeneous application infrastructure, organizations don’t get bogged down with a different approach to operations than to developing applications. Therefore, employees, customers, and suppliers can gain better access to the services they need. Exploring the Costs When you’re looking at the right balance of public cloud, private cloud, and data centers services, you have to take a step back and look at the overall costs of every environment. Start by understanding what it costs you to operate your data center. To do this, look at both direct and indirect costs related to the application or type of workload you want to move to the cloud. Some of these indirect costs are hard to evaluate, making it difficult to accurately predict the actual costs of running any given application in your company. Here is a fairly comprehensive list of possible costs: ✓ Server costs: With this and all other hardware components, you’re specifically interested in the total annual cost of ownership, which normally consists of the cost of hardware support plus some amortization cost for the purchase of the hardware. Additionally, a particular server may be used to support several different workloads. The more disparate workloads a server manages, the higher the support costs. ✓ Storage costs: What are the management and support costs for the storage hardware required for the data associated with this application? Storage costs may be very high for certain types of applications, such as e-mail or complex analytics. ✓ Network costs: When a web application you host internally, such as e-mail or collaboration, is moved to the cloud, this may reduce strain on your network. However, it can substantially increase bandwidth requirements. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 30 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition ✓ Backup and archive costs: The actual savings on backup costs depends on what the backup strategy is when the application moves into the cloud. The same is true of archiving. First, you have to understand who’s doing the backup and archiving. Is backup the responsibility of the IT organization or is it handled by the service provider? Will all backup be done in the cloud? If so, do you have a contingency plan if that cloud service is unavailable when you need that backup? Will your organization still be required to back up a percentage of critical data locally? ✓ Disaster recovery costs: In theory, the cloud service has its own disaster recovery capabilities, so there may be a consequential savings on disaster recovery. However, you need to clearly understand what your cloud provider’s disaster recovery capability is. For example, does the cloud service provider have mirrored sites in case of a power outage at one data center location? IT management must determine the level of support the cloud provider will offer. This can be an added cost from the provider, or you may seek out a secondary vendor to handle disaster recovery and procedures. ✓ Data center infrastructure costs: A whole series of costs — including electricity, floor space, cooling, and building maintenance — are an integral part of managing any data center. Because of the large investment in data centers, moving workloads to a public cloud may not be financially viable if you’re only utilizing as little as 40 percent of the data center’s compute power. (Of course, you can deploy a private cloud to take advantage of the underutilized space and the advantages of the cloud.) ✓ Software maintenance costs: What’s the annual maintenance cost for the software you may move to a cloud-based service? The answer can be complicated if the software license is part of a bundle or if the application is integrated with other applications. In addition, there’s the cost of purchasing the software. Is the organization taking advantage of a “pay-as-you go” licensing model that allows the user to pay only for what’s used? ✓ Platform costs: Some applications run only on specific operating environments — Windows, Linux, HP-UX, IBM z/OS, AIX, and so on. The annual maintenance costs These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 3: Diving into Cloud Economics 31 for the application operating environment need to be known and calculated as a part of the overall costs. ✓ Support personnel costs: What are your costs for staff support for day-to-day operations and management of this application? Will some of these costs be transferred to the cloud provider? Your own personnel will still be required to manage and monitor your cloud services in concert with your data center services. ✓ Infrastructure software costs: A whole set of infrastructure management software is in use in any installation in the data center and in a hybrid environment. Needless to say, associated costs are involved. For example, management software is typically used across a variety of data center applications and services. It is typically difficult to separate costs that may be applied to a hybrid cloud environment. Some of these costs aren’t likely to be affected by migrating a single application to the cloud. However, if you move multiple applications to the cloud, you may realize a significant decrease in many of these indirect costs. The reserved capacity package Reserved capacity is a part of many The great thing about reserved cloud initiatives. A reserved capacity capacity is that you pay a monthly package is a pool of virtual machine fee for the reservation, and then pay resources, which helps ensure a discounted rate only for the virtual resources are available when you machines you provision within the need them. You commit to a cer- pool. You aren’t locked into a set fee tain period of time, such as 6 or 12 for the entire pool of virtual machines months, and can provision and de- over the course of the reservation. provision virtual machines within If you don’t need reserve capacity, your pool during that time. A pool you can simply pay as you go for has one or more units of capacity. virtual machines you provision. But For example, one unit may include without a reservation, you aren’t ✓ 64 virtual central processing guaranteed capacity. units (CPUs) ✓ 96 gigabytes (GB) of memory ✓ 9,600 GB of storage These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 32 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition What you save or gain with cloud services Some hard costs are involved with cloud services, but understanding your business needs and growth strategies helps you put the costs into perspective. Having the ability to pay on an as-needed basis for servers, storage, and other services, for example, can give your company a needed boost for implementing innovative solutions with far less economic risk than buying the required infrastructure upfront. While business and IT come to the cloud for different reasons and with different goals, both see the cloud’s overall potential: ✓ Lasting customer relationships: Implementing an online collaboration for your customers and partners can lead to business innovation and transformation that far outweighs the costs associated with the implementation. ✓ IT without traditional boundaries and restrictions: Whereas traditional IT can trap technology and information in silos, cloud services simplify access and help connect people across the enterprise (and beyond). ✓ Improved speed and agility: Cloud services help you increase the delivery of IT computing resources. Whether your goal is to be first to market with a new product or simply providing the best, most-responsive customer service, speedy yet flexible IT is a necessity. ✓ Transformation of the economics of IT: Self-service and deployment help speed delivery of new offerings and services to your customers. Cost calculating One approach to estimating costs is to first examine your expected workloads in detail and then use an estimator tool to calculate real-world costs of running those workloads in the cloud. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 3: Diving into Cloud Economics 33 Assessing workloads When considering a migration to a cloud environment, you need to know which applications transition easily and give you the best return on investment (ROI). Assessing potential workloads is key to understanding what you should migrate and what should remain in a traditional IT environment. Many kinds of workloads are far from static and predictable. Workloads generally have a stable base but experience minor fluctuations and occasional peaks. The peaks may be seasonal in nature or triggered by a business event (such as a product launch), a sudden change in market conditions, or a product recall. To manage all these capacity requirements without having to invest in excess capacity, you need to plan ahead and decide which workloads can be moved to a dynamic infrastructure. Some vendors, such as IBM, provide workload assessment tools and services, to help prioritize and classify potential workloads for cloud delivery. After selecting inputs in a spreadsheet-like form, the tool gives you a pain versus gain score that reflects a combination of effort (to migrate), investment, and benefit of migration. Using a cost estimator tool A number of cloud providers and vendors offer calculators for helping you estimate charges for their services or to help you estimate the cost savings from cloud computing services. Some vendors provide monthly calculators for their web services. For example, a calculator may ask you a series of questions about the number of compute instances, storage needs, data transfer, load balancing, and IPs needed and then provide you with a monthly estimate. Of course, your monthly usage and, therefore, the charges may vary from the estimates that the calculator provides. Other vendors may offer total cost of ownership (TCO) calculators. These calculators may ask you a series of These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 34 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition questions about the type of deployment, the number of servers, storage requirements, and load volatility. Then the calculators estimate how much you may be able to save versus a data center deployment over five years. These calculators look at factors such as server utilization, facility, power, and hardware costs, as well as the cost of downtime, reduction in deployment, and provisioning time. Don’t base your decision to move to the cloud simply on these calculators. Some of these calculators are best used to help you better understand your computing requirements including support, training, and migration costs. These types of cost estimation tools help you determine when a public service or a private service provides the optimal solution to your future computing requirements. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 4 Managing Cloud Workloads and Services In This Chapter ▶ Digging into workloads and workload management ▶ Exploring workload use cases ▶ Understanding key principles of workload management ▶ Moving your workloads A workload is an independent service, application, or collection of code that can be executed. We’ve mentioned workloads in the first three chapters of this book, but managing workloads is so fundamental to the success or failure of your cloud activities (whether it be public, private, and especially hybrid) that it deserves its own chapter. In cloud computing, workloads are abstracted from their physical implementation, meaning that they’re isolated from the hardware they are running on. Therefore managing cloud workloads involves a different approach than companies may be accustomed to in a traditional environment. Workloads need to be structured and packaged so they can execute most efficiently. But all workloads aren’t the same: they come in many forms and flavors, as you see in this chapter, and each also comes with its own management and monitoring needs. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 36 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition Understanding Workloads Because computing requirements are varied, so too are the workloads. Whether you’re using an IaaS for infrastructure or you’re developing SaaS applications using a PaaS, here are some of the kinds of workloads you’re likely to find in a cloud environment: ✓ Batch workload: These workloads operate in the background and are rarely time sensitive. Batch workloads typically involve processing large volumes of data on a predictable schedule (for example, daily, monthly, and quarterly). ✓ Database workload: These are the most common type of workload, and they affect almost every environment in the data center and the cloud. A database workload must be tuned and managed to support the service that is using the data. A database workload tends to use a lot of Input/Output (I/O) cycles. ✓ Analytic workload: Organizations may want to use analytic services in a cloud environment to make sense of the vast amounts of data across a complex hybrid environment. In an analytics workload, the emphasis is on the ability to holistically analyze the data embedded in these workloads across public websites, private clouds, and the data warehouse. A social media analytics workload is a good example of this. These kinds of workloads tend to require real-time capabilities. ✓ Transactional workload: These are the automation of business processes such as billing and order processing. Traditionally, transactional workloads were restricted to a single system. However, with the increasing use of electronic commerce that reaches across partners and suppliers, transactional workloads must be managed across various partners’ computing environments. These workloads are both compute and storage intensive. Depending on the cost-benefit analysis, it’s likely that complex transactional workloads are best suited to a private cloud. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 4: Managing Cloud Workloads and Services 37 ✓ Test/development workloads: Many organizations leverage the cloud as a platform for testing and development workloads. Using cloud services can make the process of creating and then testing applications much more cost effective and efficient. In this way, developers have access to a set of common confirmations and development tools. Testing can be accomplished in a more efficient way within a cloud environment. Of course, some workloads are simply not suited for a cloud implementation. One example may be a workload that needs high performance network storage. Because these workloads may need to be accessed very quickly, they may not be suited for the cloud (say in an IaaS model) where you’re dependent on the Internet for network speed. It makes sense to do a cost-benefit analysis that looks at your particular workload and what it costs you to migrate it to the cloud versus the expected benefit of that move (check out Chapter 3 for more information). Looking at Workload Use Cases This section gives you two use cases that illustrate the kinds of workloads described in this chapter. Analytics workload A major maker of life-science tools and integrated systems for large-scale analysis of genetic variation and functions needed a cost-effective computer infrastructure. It wanted to expand to meet growing demand for processing related to genome research without scaling its IT investment and staffing. A public cloud solution let this company scale operations in parallel, so it could leverage multiple virtual infrastructures to different work groups at the same time. This permitted it to offer genome processing as a service at a competitive cost per processing run. Its genome analytics application involves truly huge amounts of data, and provides a wide range of analysis in the form of outcome-focused reports and analytics. These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 38 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition For this science services provider, the benefits of a public cloud solution included ✓ Creation of a custom cloud-hosted software platform designed specifically to meet genome processing needs ✓ Ability to scale to meet information processing and data handling needs for genome research ✓ Ongoing access to current infrastructure (systems, software, and communications) without requiring a substantial investment in hardware or software Batch workloads A large insurance provider in North America required a cost-effective computer infrastructure to support quarterly and year-end batch processing for capital reserves and risk reporting (required by law at state and federal levels in the U.S.). During such peak periods, computing capacity needs routinely quadruple. Purchasing capacity to meet such needs could cost millions. Naturally, this insurer wanted to meet its peak demands without over-spending on computing capacity that would go underutilized during off-peak times. A public cloud with IaaS capability provides a stable and reliable platform for provisioning compute capability and related infrastructure when needed. When the peak subsides, this environment enables quick and easy de-provisioning of added capacity as well. For this insurer, using the public cloud let it purchase extra capacity only when added work justified its use and saved it 75 percent as compared to the cost of acquiring such capacity in-house. The benefits to this insurance provider included the following: ✓ Scaling computing capacity and infrastructure up and down to match actual demand over time ✓ Maintaining a current infrastructure, without incurring capital costs for hardware or operating costs for software and services ✓ Not paying for underutilized computing capacity just to make sure it’s available only when peak times occur These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.  Chapter 4: Managing Cloud Workloads and Services 39 Looking at the Principles of Workload Management Management in this context refers to how resources are assigned in order to process workloads. Assignments may be based on resource availability, business priorities, or event scheduling. The idea of managing workloads has been around for decades. In the unified mainframe-computing era, workload management was pretty straightforward. When a task had to be executed, a job was scheduled to run on that system. The instructions for running that task or job were typically written in a complex job-control instruction language. This set of commands helped the IT organization carefully plan the execution of workloads. If a mission-critical workload required a huge amount of time to run, a set of instructions could be established to stop that workload and allow another workload to run. When the second workload finished executing its task, the long-running workload could resume. The challenge in managing any workload is making sure that it can be executed and delivered at the right performance level. It involves understanding processing requirements, modeling resources, and determining capacity. The principle is not that difficult if you’re dealing with applications running on one server or even in a homogeneous cloud environment. And, if you’re using just a public cloud provider then that provider manages your workloads. However, as IT infrastruc- tures become more complex and heterogeneous, such as in a hybrid environment, this becomes harder to do. Seeing Workload Management in a Hybrid Cloud Things get a lot more complicated in a hybrid cloud environment. With the advent of a hybrid cloud, many more applications and services exist across different countries that have to run. Some workloads may be permanent and need to These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 40 Cloud Services For Dummies, IBM Limited Edition run constantly, such as an online commerce site or a control system that manages a critical environmental process. Business services and various application models are added into the mix as well. In a hybrid cloud environment, your workloads may be running on different clouds, and running different kinds of infrastructure using different operating systems. You’re bringing together workloads from different environments that often have to behave as though they’re a unified system. Now you may think that all you have to do in a hybrid cloud environment is to get some automation software to automatically schedule resources and to perform some other functions associated with allocating resources and you’re done. However, do consider some issues when thinking about how to create a hybrid cloud environment that both performs at a quality level and meets security and governance requirements.