7 Requirements for Building Your Cloud Infrastructure

In order for a cloud to be in fact on-demand and elastic during consistently able to meet consumer service level agreements, the cloud must be workload- and resource- aware. Cloud computing raises the level of abstraction to make all elements of the data center virtualized, not just compute and memory. Once abstracted and deployed, it is critical that management solutions have the ability to create policies around workload and data management to ensure that maximum efficiency and performance is delivered to the system running in the cloud. This becomes moreover critical as systems hit peak demand. The system must be able to dynamically prioritize systems and resources on-the-fly based on business priorities of the various workloads to ensure that SLAs are met.

While the model and infrastructure for how IT services are delivered and consumed may have changed with cloud computing, it is all in all critical for these new solutions to support the same components that have always been important for end users. Whether the cloud serves as a test bed for developers prototyping new services and applications or it is running the latest version of a popular social gaming application, users expect it to be functioning every minute of every day. To be fully reliable and available, the cloud needs to be able to continue to operate during data remains intact in the virtual data center regardless if a failure occurs in one or more elements. Additionally, since most cloud architectures deal with shared resource pools across multiple groups both internal and external, security and multi-tenancy must be integrated into every aspect of an operational architecture and process. Services need to be able to provide access to only authorized users and in this shared resource pool model the users need to be able to trust that their data and applications are secure.

The cloud is a new way of consuming IT

Many elements of traditional data center management sill require some level of integration with new cloud management solutions though the cloud is a new way of consuming IT. Within most data centers, a variety of tools are used for provisioning, customer care, billing, systems management, directory, security and much more. Cloud computing management solutions do not replace these tools and it is important that there are open application programming interfaces that integrate into existing operation, administration, maintenance and provisioning systems out of the box. These include both current virtualization tools from VMware and Citrix, now also the larger data center management tools from companies like IBM and HP.

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