D IBUJAR Y M EDIR
11. SELECCIÓN GRÁFICA DE ELEMENTOS
Automation (Software Only)
IaaS Service Offerings - What You Can Buy!
Cloud automation platforms allow you to layer cloud attributes on top of an existing virtualized infrastructure. These products add automation, orchestration, user portals, service catalogs, reporting, management, monitoring, and other cloud capabilities to existing infrastructure.Cloud Optimiza
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Pre-configured hardware and software stacks that are tuned and optimized at the factory to meet your specific requirements. They are literally delivered to your data center so you have an instant internal private cloud!
As you manage your web properties in a cloud, you may need cloud acceleration services and denial of service protection. These services improve end user experience by reducing apparent network latency. Akamai content distribution services, for example, uses a network of servers to cache content and route data requests via the fastest route – eliminating round trips and improving application response times.
Regardless of whether you choose public, internal private or external private IaaS you must still manage all of your virtual assets. Additionally, for internal private cloud you are going to need to perform your own infrastructure monitoring. Most cloud providers don’t offer this service, or they do so at an additional charge. Unified monitoring of both physical and cloud assets can be achieved with third-party services or products. Pre-configured Hardware / Software Stack Cloud Acceleration Services Infrastructure Monitoring
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Cautions and Considerations
So what are some of the key cautions and considerations to be mindful of as you plan your IaaS deployment?
1. It’s a Very Dynamic Market! The IaaS market is experiencing continuous change with new platform features emerging every day. These features also vary significantly among the major players- check back often for new or updated services, or sign up for their announcements.
2. Read the Fine Print. When it comes to the service details, many of the agreements look more like software agreements than IT-
delivered SLAs. Most cloud provider’s SLAs have been whittled down to service availability and service credits. Many of the elements that you may have traditionally associated with an SLA have been moved to a separate ToS document. Pay special attention to how availability is calculated, who is responsible for monitoring availability (and how
service credits are received), data ownership, liability, indemnification, the physical location where the services are hosted, support response times and processes, and the service termination rocess. It’s a good idea to have both the CISO and the legal team take a look. Finally, if anything is unclear, ask! It’s critical that you understand the full scope of the service and what is required of you before signing anything.
3. Plan for a Change of Service Provider. Understand this upfront. You need to be able to move should you choose to, so make sure your provider has the appropriate tools and procedures to retrieve your data. Also, check on any hidden costs that may be incurred in the event that you need to pull your data out of their service. 4. Plan for Outages. Bear in mind, that when you’re using an IaaS provider, they are effectively providing you with virtual data center services. With this model, you are still responsible for the services that run on the infrastructure. This ultimately means that the availability of services is the responsibility of the consumer, not the actual infrastructure provider. They’ll make sure that the platform is available, but you need to make sure that the services you build on their platform remain available.
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5. Remember that Virtualization Adds a Layer of Complexity to Data Recovery. While you can deploy data in minutes, recovery can take hours.
6. Performance Monitoring is Up to You. This includes monitoring the end user experience, not just the application uptime.
7. Plan for Integration Issues. Be ready to deal with integration issues between your cloud services and your other enterprise services, as well as your existing identity access and management system. 8. Optimize Your Existing IT Management Architecture Before You Move to IaaS. Consolidating your infrastructure, before you move to the virtualized infrastructure, will bring disparate IT organizations together and standardize many of the different tools (monitoring, diagnostics, etc.) that are currently in use. Also be sure that the management tools in place can handle the various platforms, including virtualized environments, private and public cloud services. 9. Change Management. Be sure to engage your line of business customers, make sure they support everything and plan for changes in the scope of responsibility of your IT staff. All of those hard earned data center disciplines like change, configuration, and release management are just as important in the cloud as they are for traditional on-premises IT.
In this chapter, we’ll explore the origins of PaaS and the very particular challenges it solves both at a business and IT level. We’ll also provide a brief overview of some of the PaaS services currently available and take a look at the key considerations you should evaluate before venturing down the PaaS path. But first, let’s start with an explanation of PaaS.
What is PaaS?
Building and managing on-premises applications is a challenging and expensive endeavor, requiring complex solution stacks, expensive data centers, and a host of human resources to maintain and modify the application throughout its life cycle and the systems it relies on. But with the advancement of cloud computing, a new concept has evolved – PaaS. PaaS offers a faster and more efficient way to facilitate the deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of investing in the underlying hardware, software and data center infrastructure.
PaaS is particularly appealing to software developers who want to write excellent applications without dealing with the underlying infrastructure. PaaS includes the entire infrastructure needed to run applications over the Web without the cost and complexity of buying, installing, patching and managing the underlying hardware, operating systems, and base application software. Developers simply load their code into the cloud service and the PaaS cloud automatically handles resource provisioning and auto-scaling (elasticity) as well as load balancing and application health monitoring.
Learn about:
— What Problems does PaaS Solve? — The Typical Features of a PaaS Service — The Pros and Cons of PaaS
— Cautions and Considerations