Key Principles Of Cloud Computing

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Cloud computing is one of the best ways to reduce the IT cost and complexity, while helping to optimize the workload and provide the highest possible availability to the user base. Cloud computing utilizes a dynamic infrastructure that is specifically designed to provide more services and capacity while using fewer server resources.

The rapid growth of cloud computing offers efficiency cost saving businesses and individuals consumers. The main advantages of cloud are, i) ability to scale data storage and ii) dynamic computing power saving cost. These benefits will improve, i) government services and citizen access, ii) transform businesses, iii) provide new innovations to consumers, and iv)create energy savings.

To reach full usage of cloud computing requires cooperation between governments, industry and individual users are needed. To achieve this we have to, i) build confidence in cloud by protecting users’ interests, ii) promote the developments of standards and needed infrastructure, iii) clarify laws and policies to promote investment in cloud computing.

Factors for promoting the cloud computing development are listed below:

1. Cloud users need assurance regarding security risks. To achieve this, cloud service providers must adopt comprehensive security practices and procedures which include:

Well-recognized, transparent and verifiable security criteria.

Robust identity, authentication and access control mechanisms.

Comprehensive testing of security measures before and after deployment.

2. Illicit activities such as digital theft, fraud and malicious hacking are a threat to both consumers and service providers.

Cyber laws should be updated.

3. Data portability and seamless use of interoperable applications are key consideration for all cloud users.

Cloud providers must work together to ensure that interoperability and portability are addressed.

Government agencies should permit standards for interoperability and portability.

As the government develops and deploys cloud computing solutions it should disclose its requirements to the public.

4. Cloud users need assurance that their private information stored, processed and communicated in the cloud will not be used or disclosed by the cloud provider in unexpected ways.

Cloud providers should establish privacy policies.

Governments should accord similar protections from disclosure of data to the government held by cloud providers as are currently applied to data held on a person’s own computer or within a business’ on-premises data center.

5. Cloud technologies operate across national boundaries and their success depends on access to global markets. Countries should commit to a moratorium on implementing policies that create actual or potential trade barriers to the evolution of cloud computing and should assess existing international trade rules and update them where needed.

3.1.1 Key principles of Cloud Computing

Three key principles of cloud computing are i) abstraction, ii) automation and iii) elasticity:

Abstraction

IT providers have tried to standardize their operations so they can concentrate on optimizing their IT. Cloud computing has found a way to break out of this as cloud gives a few basic but well-defined services.

Now the burden of managing the software services falls onto the developer or user. The key point is that well-defined abstraction layers between clouds and developers or users acts as grease, that lets both side to operate efficiently and completely independent of each other. There are three layers of abstraction in clouds, they are:

i)Application as a Service (AaaS), ii) Platform as a Service (PaaS) and iii) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Automation

Automation in the cloud means that the developers or users have complete automatic control over their resources. There is no human interaction, even from a developer or user perspective. In this environment when the user needs more servers, the load balancer intimates the cloud how many more to be provided. No need to wait for someone to unpack and cable your machine, no need to wait for your IT department to find the time to install. Everything is automatic.

Full automation reduces cost and complexity for the cloud provider and it puts the developer or user in control. Now the user can reduce his time to market for the next rollout because he can do it yourself, fully automatic and don't need to call anybody, rely on someone else to set up stuff for him, or wait days until some minor hardware or software installation is completed.

Elasticity

In the early nineties, people bought large, expensive, scalable servers and waited for long time to use the full capacity of their server. This is highly inefficient as most of the time the server was underutilized. In the dot-com era, people started scaling horizontally, which allowed them to add capacity according to their needs.

Using the elasticity, peoples can easily scale up and scale down according to their daily usage.

3.1.2. Example Cloud Environment

IBM Power Systems is in an ideal example for cloud environments. Workload Optimization

Core capability of cloud computing is optimizing the workload. This allows the user to make the most of their IT resources while increasing the overall flexibility.

Limitless Virtualization

With PowerVM (available in IBM Power Systems), user can virtualize resources such as processor, memory and I/O.

Automated Management

Utilizing IBM Systems Director Enterprise for Power Systems, user has a way to manage physical as well as virtual servers in an automated fashion. This helps to reduce total cost of owner (TCO) and management costs.

Solutions of All Kinds

No matter the shape, size or composition of the cloud, IBM Power Systems has a possible solution. Here are a few of the specific offerings: i) IBM CloudBurst, ii) IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance and iii)IBM Smart Business Development and Test Cloud.

3.2 Model for Federated Cloud Computing

3.2.1 Cloud federation

Cloud Federation is the interconnecting the cloud computing environments with two or more service providers for load balancing traffic and accommodating spikes in demand. 

Cloud federation has two benefits to cloud providers. First, it allows providers to earn revenue from computing resources that would otherwise be idle or underutilized. Second, cloud federation enables cloud providers to expand their geographic footprints and accommodate sudden spikes in demand without having to build new points-of-presence (POPs).

3.2.2 What Is Cloud Federation?

Federation brings together different cloud flavors and internal resources so companies can select a computing environment on demand that makes sense for a particular workload. It opens the door to a range of useful scenarios that take advantage of cloud capabilities.

Federation is the missing link, providing a structure that bridges these disparate environments so enterprise cloud computing can become as seamless and straightforward as it needs to be.

Enterprise users don’t use federation they speak in terms of application-specific and general business requirements. The key issues in federation are i)Bridging the Differences, ii) Setting Consistent Rules, iii) Streamlining Cloud Management, and iv)Bringing the Vision to Life.

3.2.3 Two-Layer Connectivity for Cloud Federation

Hybrid clouds are achieving almost universal buy-in because of the way enterprises use the cloud. As the hybrid model federates internal and external resources, consumers can choose the most appropriate match for their workload requirements. The approach is already transforming enterprise computing, enabling a new generation of dynamic applications and deployments, such as:

Using multiple clouds for different applications according to business needs

Allocating components of an application to different environments

Moving an application to meet requirements according to stages of its lifecycle

Moving workloads closer to consumers

For hybrid computing to succeed, the cloud needs to appear like a resource on the customer network and an application running in the cloud needs to behave as if it’s running in the data center. With innovations and secure extension of the internal environment, CloudSwitch technology will bring hybrid cloud to reality.

3.3 Cloud Ecosystem Model

3.3.1 Cloud Ecosystem

Cloud ecosystem is a term which defines the complexitiy of the systems in-terms of its interdependent components that work together to enable cloud services.

Ecosystem can be defined as "the complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit". In terms of cloud computing, that complex includes not only traditional elements of cloud computing such as software and infrastructure but also consultants, integrators, partners, third parties and anything in their environments that has a bearing on the other components.

3.3.2 Cloud broker & Cloud agent

A cloud broker is a third-party individual or business that acts as an intermediary between the purchaser of a cloud computing service and the sellers of that service.

A cloud broker is a software application that facilitates the distribution of work between different cloud service providers. This type of cloud broker may also be called a cloud agent.

The broker's role may simply to save the purchaser time by researching services from different vendors and providing the customer with information about how to use cloud computing to support business goals. Cloud broker also provides the customer with additional services, like deduplication, encryption and transfer of the customer's data to the cloud.

3.3.3 Cloud Outlook

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Fig 14: Cloud Outlook

We can experience a phenomenal cloud growth in coming years, increase in cloud adoption and implementations etc. Figure 14 shows that the areas of growth that has happened / will be happened in coming years. Areas such as i) big cloud data, ii) business cloud, iii) mobile cloud and iv) gamification cloud are the key trends. The following are the areas that highlight the key trends:

Big Data Cloud - The amount of data created and replicated in 2012 surpassed 1.9 ZB. It is estimated by IDC that the total size of data in the universe will reach 9 ZB within four years and nearly 21% of the information will be touched by cloud. The big data cloud enables an economical way to extract value from very large volumes of data by high-velocity capture, discovery, transformation and analysis. 

Business Cloud - The cloud delivery model will go beyond the traditional software (SaaS), platform (PaaS), infrastructure (Iaas) and business process (BPaaS) to a more business-oriented cloud model.

Mobile Cloud - Mobile applications will continue to grow with the social capabilities and innovative mobility devices, which will drive the accelerated progress of cloud computing to empower the users and consumerisation: anybody, anywhere, anytime and any device. The mobile cloud will push many organizations to rethink their business models.

Gamification Cloud - The gamification cloud will make technology edutainment, guide a participant with a path to mastery and autonomy, encourage users to involve in desired behaviors and make use of humans' psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.

3.3.4 Cloud Unified Process (CUP)

"We need to fundamentally reengineer the way we design, configure, teach, adopt and deploy process", said by Ivar Jacobson, inventor of UML (unified modeling language). This becomes true for cloud computing paradigm. A complete process model for systematic cloud adoption and deployment is lacking. This leads to Cloud Unified Process (CUP).

Cloud Unified Process is an end-to-end iterative and incremental process structure for the development and operations of cloud services in a lifecycle fashion. The key characteristics of CUP include: i) Goal-oriented, ii) Use case-focused, iii) Role-based, iv) Architecture-centric, v) Risk-aware, vi) Iteration-centered, vii) Model-driven, viii) Product-neutral, ix) Vendor- agnostic and x) Technology-independent.

The core benefits of CUP are more focused effort, built-in flexibility, time savings, higher quality, increased cost effectiveness and reduced project risks.

The CUP framework is composed of a hierarchical structure. The top level of CUP comprises five components: Strategize, Transform, Operationalize, Run and Enrich (STORE) (figure 15). At the second level, each component is further decomposed into individual sub-components, with more granular details. Further, the inputs, activities and outputs for every process step are prescribed in the framework, coupled with other artifacts, such as key objectives and practice guidance. One of the biggest challenges in the cloud endeavor is how to make up a comprehensive action plan systematically.

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Fig 15 Cloud Unified Process (CUP)

A unified road mapping framework that systemizes the comprehensive strategization and operationalization of cloudification, composed of 4 incremental stages: Plan, Adopt, Transform and Harness (PATH). Different road mapping which are best practices to execute PATH are: Alignment, Blueprint, Checklist and Discipline (ABCD).

3.4 Cloud Governance

3.4.1 Taking steps to clarify cloud governance

The concept of "governance" means different things to different people and in fact, even the word itself is open to debate. However, no matter how you slice it, the consensus is that governance will play a crucial role in the cloud computing and can complement governance existing processes.

Cloud services are standardized offerings that are delivered through a common service catalogue. The services are rapidly provisioned and delivered out of a highly elastic and scalable infrastructure with a pay-as-you-go model, said by Ric Telford, vice president of cloud services at IBM.

Just as with traditional back office applications, compliance is key. "Anything that an organization could engage in that would need to be monitored by senior management at least on an occasional basis to make sure that the company is behaving properly in the modern world" should be governed, says Denis Pombriant, managing principal analyst of Beagle Research Group.

In cloud computing, providers should be transparent about the services that they offer, with clearly stated service-level agreements. At the same time, enterprises need to assume responsibility to ensure that mission critical business processes are safely supported by on-demand technology to minimize the loss of service and data loss, he added.

Governance in the cloud means the same as governance in SOA, except service level is 1,000 times more important. Developers that consume third-party services through interfaces across the Web need to know about SLAs. One of the piece of [cloud] governance is to provide that crucial information.

Cloud computing cause’s good IT governance and a focus on IT governance leads to the cloud. If the user is building a cloud, it will have the attributes of good governance, such as financial visibility into the cost of services and the ability to more accurately deliver on SLAs by taking control over how resources are provisioned.

IT organizations seek to adopt the benefits of cloud computing, it's important that they do it in a way that aligns with their own IT governance strategies. Cloud adoption, should be done in a way that does not disrupt but reinforces governance processes.

One of the unsung benefits of cloud computing is reintroducing the centralized control enjoyed during mainframe era. Some SalesForce customers are using the cloud to eliminate rogue applications in their organizations that can cause compliance issues, including databases and spreadsheets, he noted.

Software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service have huge potential for governing applications. Xactium produces a SalesForce-hosted service for managing corporate governance, risk and compliance requirements.

The cloud enables enterprises to provide central points of information for sharing and managing risk data. When the user turn a spreadsheet into a cloud application that is then part of multi-tenant platform, it becomes controllable and manageable by the IT department and data is accessible across the organization, or can be invisible. While the cloud may offer advantages in enforcing governance processes, the onus is still on the developer to manage services from the easiest stages of development.

Customers should do some due diligence on development technologies that help to maintain governance regardless of what environment they run. Cloud databases still must have built in audit trails, he noted.

Organizations that use cloud services also need a way to validate services and have rules and policies around users. Cloud server templates should be trusted enough to be launched predictably and automatically and in that way, they become a tool for governance and compliance management, he observed. On-demand vendors operate a myriad of data centers that have extraordinary policies for redundancy and security, including physical security, which most enterprises lack. However, cloud services are most often used to handle front office data and that the most sensitive information in the enterprise, such as consumer credit card data still resides on internal servers.

Some people think that it's a fad and don't have a cloud strategy but when user is focused on IT governance and do the right things with architecture and strategy they have basically built a cloud. Cloud computing is the evolution of optimized and well-defined IT infrastructure.

3.4.2 SOA and Cloud Governance

Cloud computing is starting to take hold, especially in the marketing literature of vendors and consulting firms. Yet, there is an increasing number of Cloud success stories, ranging from simplistic consumption of utility Services and offloading of compute resources to the sort of application and process clouds. Perhaps the reason why usage of the Cloud is still nascent in the enterprise is because of an increasing chorus of concerns being voiced about the usage of Cloud resources:

Cloud availability

Cloud security

Erosion of data integrity

Data replication and consistency issues

Potential loss of privacy

Lack of auditing and logging visibility

Potential for regulatory violations

Application sprawl & dependencies

Inappropriate usage of Services

Difficulty in managing intra-Cloud, inter-Cloud and Cloud and non-Cloud interactions and resources

The above issues are primarily, if not exclusively, governance concerns. In many ways, we can apply what we’ve already learned, implemented and invested in SOA Governance directly to issues of Cloud Governance. However, SOA and Cloud, while complementary, are not equivalent concepts. There are a wide range of patterns and usage considerations that are either new to the SOA Governance picture or ones that we were able to gloss over. To make Cloud computing a success, we need to make Cloud governance a success. So, what can we apply from our existing SOA governance knowledge and what new things do companies need to consider?

3.4.3 Design-Time Cloud Governance

Designing Services to be deployed in the Cloud is much like designing Services for our own SOA infrastructure. In fact, that is why most Cloud infrastructure providers, whether they are third-party Cloud providers like Amazon.com or self-hosting Cloud infrastructure vendors, pitch the simplicity of Cloud Service development and deployment. However, within this simple mode there are some demerits, and users may think it is hard to get the developers on the same page with regards to Service development. Like the early days of Web Services-centric SOA development, companies faced developers hacking out a wide array of incompatible "Just a Bunch of Web Services (JBOWS)" style Services thrown on the network, now to face the same issue in the Cloud.

With the simplicity of Cloud Service development, deployment and consumption, developers can use Cloud capabilities undetected by IT management. It’s not unusual for a developer to interact with an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) image for a project. And to make matters worse, not everyone creating or consuming Cloud Services will even be from within the IT department.

SOA governance tools are often missing in the Cloud Computing environment. There’s no central point for a Cloud consumer / developer to view the Services and associated policies. Furthermore, design-time policies are easily enforceable when user has control over the development and quality assurance process but those are notoriously lacking in the Cloud environment. The result is that design-time policies are not consistently enforced on client side, if at all. Clearly, SOA governance vendors and best practices need to step up to the plate here and apply for SOA registries/repositories and governance processes to give the control that’s needed to avoid chaos and failure. This means that IT needs to provide the enterprise a unified, Service-centric view of IT environment across the corporate data center and the Cloud.

3.4.4 Run-Time Cloud Governance

Making matters worse are a collection of run-time and policy issues that are complicated by Cloud computing infrastructure. Furthermore, systems are unlikely to have the same security standards as internally. This means that our security policies need to be that much more granular. User cannot count on using perimeter-based approaches to secure your data or Service access. Every message needs to be scrutinized and need to separate Service and data policy definition from enforcement. The Cloud doesn’t simplify security issues it complicates and exacerbates them. However, there’s nothing new here. Solid SOA security approaches, such as "trust no one" approach and the Cloud is simply another infrastructure for enforcing these already stringent security policies.

An effective Cloud governance approach must provide the means to control, monitor and adapt Services, both with on-premises and Cloud-based implementations and needs to provide consistency across internal SOA & cloud SOA. To make this concept a reality, we need management and governance that spans SOA infrastructure boundaries.

Furthermore, companies need to implement usage policies to control the excessive and potentially expensive, use of Cloud Services in unauthorized ways. One way to solve this problem is through the use of network intermediaries and gateways that keep a close eye on traffic between the corporate network and the Cloud. Intermediaries can scan cloud-bound data for leakage of private or company-sensitive data, filter traffic sent up to cloud platforms, apply access policies to Cloud Services, provide visibility into authorized and unauthorized usage of Cloud Services and prevent unsanctioned use of Cloud Services by internal staff, among other benefits. Of course, these benefits do not extend to intra-Cloud Service consumption but can provide a lowest common denominator of runtime governance required by the organization.

3.4.5 Change Management and Cloud Governance

The last major Cloud governance issue is one of change management. How does the user prevent versioning of Cloud Services or even Cloud infrastructure from having significant repercussions? Proper Cloud governance techniques need to lift a page from the SOA governance book and deal with versioning at all levels: Service implementation, contract, process, infrastructure, policy, data and schema.

SOA is an architectural approach and philosophy guiding the development and management of applications. Cloud is a deployment and operational model suited to host certain types of Services within an existing SOA initiative. The Cloud concept within the SOA context is one of Service infrastructure, implementation, composition and consumption. The SOA concept within the Cloud context is one of application-level abstraction of Cloud resources. Therefore, think of Cloud Governance as evolved SOA governance.

Companies with a proper SOA governance should have few problems as they move to increasingly utilize Cloud services but those who have failed to take either an architectural perspective on Cloud or have glossed over SOA governance issues will be forced to quickly get a SOA perspective to get things right. In order for these both to work together, companies need to have a consistent SOA and Cloud Governance strategy.

3.4.6 Stages of a service lifecycle: SOA and Cloud

In the life of every SOA-enabled or cloud service, there are 11 key stages that can help mean the difference between the services and business agility, they are i)SOA Adoption Planning, ii)Service Inventory Analysis, iii)Service-Oriented Analysis (Service Modeling), iv)Service-Oriented Design or Service Contract, v) Service Logic Design, vi)Service Development, vii) Service Testing, viii)Service Deployment and Maintenance, ix)Service Usage and Monitoring, x)Service Discovery and xi)Service Versioning and Retirement.

3.4.7 Successful Cloud Governance and Adoption

Cloud computing introduces new security risks and compromises the traditional control of IT. Therefore, it is imperative that IT management establish firm control and oversight of cloud initiatives. Cloud governance, which is a logical evolution of current service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance strategies, offers a means to assert control over both internal and external applications and data.

Cloud governance provides a unified, application-centric view of IT throughout the corporate data center and into the cloud. It clears the way for secure, managed and incremental cloud adoption. But cloud governance can go badly if implemented too hastily or as an afterthought. The following are ten tips to follow for successful cloud governance:

1: Start with enforcement

2: Form factors

3: Distributed, virtualized management

4: The ability to maintain a central system of record for critical assets

5: Loose coupling is a must between enforcement points and repository

6: The ability to author centrally but deploy globally

7: Offer a global view of the application network

8: Flexibility in policy language

9: Apply SOA lessons to the cloud

10: Utilize the cloud in the solution

Summary

The material in this chapter is the foundation for numerous topics that you will encounter in subsequent chapters. For example, Chapter 1 which deals with cloud technology such as life cycle model, cloud modeling and references, which will form a basic for the Cloud Architecture described in Chapter 2. In this chapter, we took a closer look towards logical architecture of cloud, holistic cloud reference model and answer why we need holistic cloud management. The concepts of convolution and correlation are explained in Chapter 3, where basics of cloud modeling are explained and how a cloud can be an eco-friendly and used to build cloud governance model.