In my last blog, I discussed how to optimize workloads across the cloud. This is based on the assumption that you already have an existing infrastructure. What if you don’t have an existing cloud infrastructure but would like to design one from scratch? Here is what you should be thinking about to get the most from your new cloud.
But first let’s take a look at other types of infrastructures – say a road. When you design a new road, you have to collect data such as population densities around the area, people’s working schedules, what types of vehicles will run on the road, and so on. With that information, you can decide how many lanes you want, what kind of road surface is required, and so on. You don’t just make up the design specification from scratch, and lay down an eight-lane freeway everywhere.
The same process applies in designing the cloud infrastructure as well. Unfortunately this is not what we see often today.
Top-down approach
In my previous blog , I said infrastructure is a means and application is the end. We need to drive the design cloud architecture from the application perspective. This is what I call the top-down approach. Read more »
Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
Cloud computing hasn’t changed the nature of computing – it just changed provisioning and management. That’s important to remember because workloads in the cloud are very much similar to what we see in traditional computing infrastructures. To get the most out of your investment in cloud services or in your own physical IT infrastructure, you need to understand how to optimize workloads.
Workload Categorization
Typical computing workloads involve four basic parts: computation, memory, networking, and storage. Almost all applications have these four parts but mostly not balanced.
Now let’s quickly review the essential categories of application workloads: Read more »
Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
In my last post, I discussed when not to use cloud services. Basically you should avoid the cloud for your organization’s core competency IT systems. Remember, cloud computing is not a silver bullet for everything.
Today I want to share the stories from the other side: when you should use cloud services. As a rule of thumb, you use cloud services for your non-core competency IT systems. But, what are the typical non-core competency systems?
There could be many cases in which you can use cloud services. Let me go through some of them by sharing customer experiences:
Outsourcing projects. If something is outsourced, most likely you don’t think it’s a core competency to your business. You can then leverage the full benefit that public cloud services bring to you. You can easily have workspace that is accessible by both your employees and contractors, and it’s more secure than opening up your own infrastructure to your contractors. Read more »
Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
During the July 4th long weekend, I got the chance to read the book “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Hsieh. It’s a great book with many great ideas and lessons he learned from LinkExchange and Zappos.
So, how does this relate to cloud computing?
Here’s what Tony wrote…
“It was a valuable lesson. We learned that we should never outsource our core competency. As an e-commerce company, we should have considered warehousing to be our core competency from the beginning. Outsourcing that to a third party and trusting that they would care about our customers as much as we would was one of our biggest mistakes. If we hadn’t reacted quickly, it would have eventually destroyed Zappos.”
In this paragraph Tony summarized the lesson from contracting eLogistics for inventory services in Kentucky, which turned out to be a mess and almost killed Zappos when cash flow became a big issue.
From a business perspective, cloud services are not much different from the inventory services. Both are all about outsourcing. The high tech nature of cloud doesn’t change the business nature of cloud services. What happened to Zappos could potentially happen to any cloud customers. Read more »
Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
Application Provisioning
With the right system configuration in place, it’s time to install the applications. So why not use the same tools we used for the OS and middleware? Do we need yet another set of tools?”
It depends. You can use the same set of tools for middleware to install some applications. The middleware appears like an application to the OS as well. The difference is whether your application is stable enough and whether you need to customize per node. The tools like Puppet can be good for stable applications that can be deployed the same way across all nodes. If your application is still a work in progress and you need flexibility to tweak it, you need more specialized application provisioning tools.
The big technical difference between application and middleware provisioning tools is that application tools push the application to the nodes and remotely change anything as needed. The process is procedural.
The middleware provisioning tools normally have agents on the nodes to pull the software based on the prescribed configuration files. The process is declarative.
Beyond the “push” and “pull” difference, the application provisioning tools can also manage the lifecycles of applications (sometimes called services) distributed on different nodes with a single line of command or code. Given the nature of remote command dispatching framework, the application provisioning tool can do almost anything. If there has to be a limitation, it’s your imagination.
So if you develop applications by yourself, you most likely need application provisioning tools.
Let’s see what tools are there. Read more »
Author: Steve Jin is the author of VMware VI and vSphere SDK (Prentice Hall), creator of VMware vSphere Java API. For future articles, please subscribe to RSS or Email, and follow on Twitter.
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