Cloud Computing can be realized through multiple implementation models. One of the implementations that is gaining a lot of interest is the Private Cloud. This article attempts to look at the key attributes of an ideal Private Cloud and takes a futuristic view of the Private Cloud in an enterprise from the IaaS perspective.
Private or Public, every Cloud implementation has to respect four key tenets. They are
- Elasticity
- Pay-By-Use
- Self Service
- Programmability
Elasticity gives the illusion of infinity. Consumers of the Cloud will be able to scale up, scale out or scale down based on the demand for resources. Since this happens on the fly, applications can instantly scale to meet the demand.
Pay-By-Use turns the CAPEX to OPEX. Instead of investing in a server farm upfront, the cost can be distributed based on the usage of resources. This is a significant benefit offered by the Cloud.
Self Service drives the adoption of Cloud by reducing the middle men. Since there is no human intervention required to perform standard operations, consumers will be in control of their infrastructure and needs.
Programmability enables the integration of Cloud with existing business logic and organizational workflow. This makes the Cloud truly democratic by opening up APIs that can be consumed in multiple ways.
These tenets of the Private Cloud offer quite a few benefits to the IT departments. Let’s see how these align with the typical operations that the IT department performs.
- Seasonal / On-demand need for servers – This sounds very familiar to IT Managers. How many times did you walk out of a leadership meeting where you were asked to quickly setup an intranet site to support the new management initiative? Sometimes this becomes a non-negotiable ask from the management and there is no scope to explain what it takes to setup a new server. You cannot afford to wait till the vendor delivers a new server and to setup the right software stack on it. It is a long cycle before you provision your server for the consumption of internal employees and groups. There is yet another classic scenario that IT managers will relate to. During certain seasonal events like performance review and internal evaluation, you have to reallocate resources to meet the demand. Provisioning and de-provisioning these servers is expensive, laborious and time consuming. This is where the Elasticity attribute of the Cloud will help you. You can have a set of templates of virtual server images that can be quickly provisioned. These templates will have the baseline software preinstalled in them. So the turnaround time is very less. For seasonal demands, just increase the number of virtual servers powering the internal application and you have instant scalability. Once you have passed the peak season, scale down by resetting your virtual server count.
- Metering and Billing for resource consumption - Servers and datacenters are expensive resources. It costs money for the organization to setup and maintain them. It is important to prioritize the resource usage to get better RoI from the datacenter. The organization might want to provide more resources to a department that is delivering a mission critical project. To discourage the misuse of the resources, organizations can enable a charge back model for the infrastructure usage. That way, they can monitor, track and optimize the usage of the resources. The report that gets generated at the end of the fiscal year will provide an interesting insight into the Total Cost of Ownership of your datacenter. The Pay-By-Use attribute of Private Cloud brings you these capabilities.
- Bring IT close to the employees – While most of the IT departments have a portal to request new servers and the provisioning, there is a lot of manual processes involved in completing these tasks. With a Private Cloud, authorized employees and managers will feel empowered because they are in control of their infrastructure requirements. Most of the manual process will be eliminated by scripting and automating the provisioning of virtual servers. With appropriate workflow and approvals in place, the Self Service attribute enables the organization to realize the promise of the dynamic datacenter.
- Respect the organization policies and workflow – Every organization has well defined set of policies for procurement and provisioning of resources. When IT turns into a commodity, it should integrate with existing workflows. With the promise of dynamic datacenter, you want to automate the whole cycle of provisioning new resources. This involves programming the Private Cloud and treat it like any other business logic. For example, when an employee requests for a new server, his manager will approve it and send it for approval to the IT manager. After all the approvals are given, the system should automatically provision the server and send a mail to all the stakeholders. Similarly, the IT manager might want to generate reports that help him understand the usage of the resources by cost center and a further breakup of no. of virtual servers deployed per cost center. The Programmability of the Private Cloud will enable all these scenarios.
Now that we have seen what to expect from a Private Cloud, I want to walk you through a fictitious scenario that depicts the benefits.
ABC Consulting Services is a software consulting company that is into the business of system integration and custom software development. There are about 1500 employees across various departments that include HR, Finance, Sales and Marketing, Development, Operations and IT. Every time the sales team gets a new order for delivering a custom software solution, a new team is established to get started on the development project. After compiling the requirements for the new development and testing environment, the Project Head sends a request to the IT Manager to provision the required infrastructure. After a few rounds of negotiation, the development team and IT agree on the requirements and the timeline for provisioning it. The timeline might be anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months. IT department works in the background to reassign unused resources and ordering new servers to complete the setup. While IT was busy with this, there are a couple of more projects and soon they realized that they are spreading too thin in the process of meeting the demand from the internal project teams. Meanwhile, the management has formed a taskforce to evaluate the TCO of current IT environment. The taskforce is asked to propose new ways to increase the efficiency of the datacenter.
Let’s look at some of the issues at ABC Consulting Services -
- Long turnaround time for provisioning
- IT has dependency on external server vendors
- Project teams have dependency on IT
- Unpredictable work loads and demands for provisioning
- Lack of resource optimization
- Manual reassignment and reallocation of resources
- Lack of ability to track IT usage by project
How can a Private Cloud help ABC Consulting Services? Here is the after effect of adopting a Private Cloud -
The Project Head will logon to an internal portal to request the provisioning of the new environment. A mail goes to the IT Manager to review the request. The IT Manager will access the Server Utilization dashboard of the internal IT portal which shows him the typical patterns of utilization of the physical servers and the virtual servers in the datacenter. After a quick negotiation with the Project Head, the IT Manager will approve the modified request. A provisioning task gets assigned to an IT administrator who will logon to the Private Cloud Control Panel to choose the right set of Virtual Server images from the library of server images. He will then choose a script to create a virtual network of these servers. Once the script is complete, the IT Administrator gets an email that the provisioning is complete and ready to be tested. Once he is convinced, he will mark the task as completed and that results in the IT Manager and the Project Head receiving a notification that the environment is ready. Periodically, IT Manager will be able to generate reports that explain the utilization of the physical and virtual resources per department / project. He can then send a bill to individual Project Heads based on their consumption.
What issues did the Private Cloud solve?
- Reduced turnaround time for provisioning (from few weeks to few hours)
- Reduced dependencies on external vendors (due to better utilization of existing servers)
- Predictable workloads based on the patterns established over a period of time
- Highly optimized resources due to dynamic allocation of virtual servers
- Dynamic assignment and on-the-fly reallocation of resources
- Complete visibility into the usage of physical and virtual servers
I personally believe that the future of every IT department is a Private Cloud. Do you agree with my viewpoint?
