The Common Cloud Management Platform (CCMP) contains a set of business and operational management focused services that must be used by Cloud Services to actually be a cloud service.
The CCMP is responsible for:
Delivering instances of Cloud Services of any category to Cloud Service Consumers
The ongoing management of all Cloud service instances from a provider perspective
Allowing Cloud Service Consumers to manage their Cloud Service instances in a self-service fashion
The technical aspects of a Cloud Service are captured in a service template, which is also the artifact that describes how the OSS capabilities of the CCMP are exploited within the context of the respective Cloud Service. The
considerations that we made for the provided services are described in 4.1, “Scope of the Smart Analytics Cloud” on page 28.
Note: The physical existence of a virtualized infrastructure on the cloud service provider side is not mandatory because a cloud service provider can consume infrastructure as a service (and the required CCMP) from a different cloud service provider and put higher-value cloud services on top.
The CCMP is defined as a general purpose cloud management platform built to support the management of any category of cloud service.
As the name already implies, the CCMP is structured as a platform. Based on the platform nature, the CCMP contains a set of services (some of them optional) that are used within the context of a specific cloud service. The CCMP services provided to the cloud service developers must be distinguished from the cloud services developed by cloud service developers. Cloud Service developers are strongly encouraged to use the services provided by the CCMP to enable the economies of scale needed for achieving the extremely high degrees of efficiency associated with any cloud computing environment.
As an example, it is required to apply a special audit for any software component that has financial impact, which means the component that is doing billing for the consumption of a cloud service must be audited. By establishing a single deployment of a billing component, shared amongst multiple cloud services, the complex and time-consuming audit process must only be executed one time and can then be used for any number of cloud services instead of executing a separate audit each time a new cloud service is deployed in an environment without a CCMP. Clearly, this concept of sharing enables economies of scale and does not only apply to the billing service of BSS but also for any other
management service that is part of a CCMP deployment. The CCMP is split into two main elements:
Operational Support Services Business Support Services
Business Support Services
BSS represents the set of business-related services exposed by the CCMP (billing, entitlement, invoicing, and so on), which must be exploited by Cloud Service Developers to take advantage of the common cloud management platform.
Figure 8-4 on page 105 shows details about the business support services for a cloud.
The BSS provides services that either enable the cloud service provider or facilitates certain task to deliver the cloud from a business perspective. It contains the services offering management, customer management, pricing and rating, order management, entitlement management, subscriber management, general accounting, invoicing, billing, peering and settlement, contract and agreement management, opportunity to order, metering, analytics and reporting, and service offer catalog. Besides the business aspect, there is also the
standardized IT products and services. In the reference architecture, this area is called Operational Support Services.
Figure 8-4 Cloud management architecture Business support services
Like any other component of the CCMP, the BSS is generic across all cloud service types and can be configured to behave appropriately in the context of the managed cloud services. As an example, the billing service of the CCMP BSS must be usable to do billing for the consumption of virtual machines (IaaS), a multi-tenancy capable middleware platform, such as the Common Cloud Service Platform (PaaS), and for collaboration services, such as LotusLive™ (SaaS). This drives the need for a proper platform-level definition of all BSS components and exploitation artifacts enabling cloud service developers to prime the behavior of each BSS component in a cloud-service specific fashion.
Operational Support Services
OSS represents the set of operational management and technical-related services exposed by the CCMP, which must be exploited by Cloud Service Developers to take advantage of the common cloud management platform. Figure 8-5 on page 106 shows the components that are included in the operational support services for a cloud.
The OSS contains the following services: service delivery catalog, service template, service automation management, service request management,
Offering Mgmt
Order Mgmt General accounting
Customer Mgmt
Entitlement Mgmt
Contract & Agreement Mgmt Opportunity to Order
Pricing & Rating
Peering & Settlement Subscriber Mgmt Service Offering Catalog Invoicing Billing
BSS
Business Support Serviceschange and configuration management, image life cycle management,
provisioning, incident and problem management, IT service level management, monitoring and event management, IT asset and license management, capacity and performance management, and virtualization management.
Later in this chapter we discuss how we implemented the key services that are relevant for our lab environment. However, some of the services are key services but were not implemented in our environment. We provide a more detailed description of these and give an outlook on how they can be implemented in later releases of our lab environment.
Obviously, the ideal case from a cost optimization and economies-of-scale perspective is to use as much as possible shared CCMP OSS/BSS functionality, but if necessary other options are also viable. In general, OSS and BSS are viewed as the (integrated) set of management platform functionality underpinning the operation of a cloud service (similar to middleware being the functional / runtime platform). Figure 8-5 shows the operational support services in the cloud management architecture.
Figure 8-5 Cloud management architecture Operational support services
Many management domains shown in the OSS can also be encountered in traditionally managed data centers (monitoring and event management, provisioning, incident and problem management, and so on), while other components are new and rather specific to the degrees of automation and
OSS
Operational Support Services
Service Delivery Catalog Service Automation Management Service Templates Change & ConfigurationManagement
Service Request Management Image Lifecycle Management
Provisioning Incident & ProblemManagement IT Service Level Management Monitoring &
Event Management IT Asset & License Management
Virtualization Mgmt Performance ManagementCapacity & Common Cloud Management Platform
efficiency that are associated with clouds (service automation, image life cycle management).
Particularly for the traditional management domains it is important to note that conceptually they are the same in the cloud world and in the traditional world, whereas in a cloud world these domains are implemented in radically different ways taking advantage of the high degrees of homogeneity in a cloud, for example, a traditionally managed data center is implemented in a way that an incident gets raised if a physical server fails, a ticket gets opened, and assigned to an administrator (maybe 2 AM in the morning). After some time, an escalation takes place if the administrator has not resolved the ticket until then. In contrast, in a cloud environment, there is also incident and problem management, whereas here a broken physical machine can be left broken on the floor until some later point of time because the virtual machines that are running on that physical machine can be brought up on another one. Both scenarios address incident and problem management, but in radically different ways and for radically different labor costs. A similar
cloudyfied
perspective exists also for most other OSS components.The platform notion of CCMP obviously also applies to all components defined as part of the OSS: A proper platform-level definition of all OSS components and exploitation artifacts enabling cloud service developers is needed to prime the behavior of each BSS component in a cloud service specific fashion.