Cloud Computing Infrastructure Models
written by gunther gerlach-2009
There are many considerations for cloud computing architects to make when moving from a standard enterprise application deployment model to one based on cloud computing. There are public and private clouds that offer complementary benefits, there are three basic service models to consider (Public, private, and hybrid clouds), and there is the value of open APIs versus proprietary ones.
models: Public, private, and hybrid clouds
Organizations can choose to deploy applications on public, private, or hybrid clouds, each of which has its trade-offs. Public clouds are typically “out there” on the Internet and private clouds are typically located on premises, a private cloud might be hosted at a co-location facility as well.
Public clouds are run by third parties, and applications from different customers are likely to be mixed together on the cloud’s servers, storage systems, and networks. Public clouds are most often hosted away from customer premises, and they provide a way to reduce customer risk and cost by providing a flexible, even temporary extension to enterprise infrastructure.
If a public cloud is implemented with performance, security, and data locality in mind, the existence of other applications running in the cloud should be transparent to both cloud architects and end users. Indeed, one of the benefits of public clouds is that they can be much larger than a company’s private cloud might be, offering the ability to scale up and down on demand, and shifting infrastructure risks from the enterprise to the cloud provider, if even just temporarily.
Portions of a public cloud can be carved out for the exclusive use of a single client, creating a virtual private datacenter. Rather than being limited to deploying virtual machine images in a public cloud, a virtual private datacenter gives customers greater visibility into its infrastructure. Now customers can manipulate not just virtual machine images, but also servers, storage systems, network devices, and network topology. Creating a virtual private datacenter with all components located in the same facility helps to lessen the issue of data locality because bandwidth is abundant and typically free when connecting resources within the same facility.
Private clouds are built for the exclusive use of one client, providing the utmost control over data, security, and quality of service. The company owns the infrastructure and has control over how applications are deployed on it. Private clouds may be deployed in an enterprise datacenter, and they also may be deployed at a co-location facility.
Private clouds can be built and managed by a company’s own IT organization or by a cloud provider. In this “hosted private” model, a company can install, configure, and operate the infrastructure to support a private cloud within a company’s enterprise datacenter. This model gives companies a high level of control over the use of cloud resources while bringing in the expertise needed to establish and operate the environment.
Hybrid clouds combine both public and private cloud models. They can help to provide on-demand, externally provisioned scale. The ability to augment a private cloud with the resources of a public cloud can be used to maintain service levels in the face of rapid workload fluctuations. This is most often seen with the use of storage clouds to support Web 2.0 applications. A hybrid cloud also can be used to handle planned workload spikes. Sometimes called “surge computing,” a public cloud can be used to perform periodic tasks that can be deployed easily on a public cloud.
Hybrid clouds introduce the complexity of determining how to distribute applications across both a public and private cloud. Among the issues that need to be considered is the relationship between data and processing resources. If the data is small, or the application is stateless, a hybrid cloud can be much more successful than if large amounts of data must be transferred into a public cloud for a small amount of processing.
posted by www.sun.com
