Page 77 - Cloud Essentials
P. 77

be anywhere (especially public cloud clients), bandwidth

                     considerations are paramount.
                      Latency tolerance   Cloud computing serves clients at spread-out
                     locations, and you should expect an increase in transmission delays.
                     Not all applications tolerate these delays.

                      Firewalls and access control   This can be configured in the cloud,
                     locally on premises, or both. For example, using IaaS cloud servers
                     and networks implies the use of a private cloud network. Some

                     providers allow you to use your existing IP address structure in the
                     cloud. This private cloud network might have configurable firewall
                     options. Cloud servers (virtual servers) always have their own
                     firewall settings.
                      Resilience and redundancy   Virtual servers, clustering, load

                     balancing, cloud storage, backup, data replication—these all ensure
                     that computing services are highly available and that there are multiple
                     copies of the data they produce.









               Some or all of these points will be detailed with your cloud provider–
               supplied service level agreement (SLA). The SLA spells out what cloud
               customers can expect in terms of service including guaranteed uptime,

               response time, and billing rates.






               Automation and Self-Service
               Traditionally,  IT  systems  are  built  with  engineering  diagrams  and  work

               orders, which are then executed by IT operations, and this can take weeks.
               Cloud-computing service models allow that to be done through self-service
               web sites and web services, which can take merely minutes.
                  Automation is the key to reducing operational expenses. How automation
               is implemented depends on the existing capabilities of the organization. The
               desirable end state is where business requirements are input to a service
               orchestration  tool  or  function  that  automatically  configures  entire

               application  server  stacks  and  automatically  provisions  and  deprovisions
               servers, as load varies. According to the National Institute of Standards and
               Technology  (NIST),  “Service  Orchestration  refers  to  the  composition  of



                                                           77
   72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80   81   82