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2 ExEcutivE Summary

3 a convErgEncE of trEndS

4 Building on and ExtEnding virtualization

5 Policy and aPPlication lifEcyclE managEmEnt

7 cutting acroSS SiloS

8 concluSion

Why build a private

infrastructure-as-a-service cloud?gordon Haff


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executive summary

Cloud computing is the convergence of a variety of trends including network-centric application access,

the consumerization of IT, greatly increased scale and complexity, open source, and virtualization.

Many organizations are adopting private clouds because they want to gain the operational benets

of cloud computing while retaining maximum control over their IT infrastructure.

Virtualization is typically the foundation for and the path to cloud, but by itself can result in virtual

machine (VM) sprawl and new silos.

An infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud, such as Red Hat CloudForms, can be used to operationalize

governance and automation of an IT infrastructure, but its important to establish the associated policies

and processes up-front.

Self-service under policy allows IT to federate administrative tasks through a service catalog, bothreducing overall effort and allowing for faster application deployments.

Application lifecycle management is a key factor in eliminating VM sprawl and maintaining governance.

Application lifecycle management should govern content within running images as well as the images

(containers) themselves.

Cloud computing can help organizations cut across their infrastructure silos and move towards a feder-

ated, policy-driven set of resources that lets IT spend more time on delivering innovation and less on

keeping the lights on.

Why build a private infrastructure-as-a-service cloud? | Gordon Haff


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a convergence of trends

Cloud computing rst emerged as a form of utility computing. This was essentially an economic model

that purported to parallel the adoption of standardized electric power and an associated pay-as-you-go

delivery model. The metaphor was that customized, expensive datacenters recall how water power systems

and steam turbines had to be built anew for each textile mill or shoe factory. By contrast, cloud computing

viewed computing as a commodity that could be purchased off the grid as needed.

The reality has turned out to be a bit different. While the public cloud economic model is certainly inter-

esting for certain types of applications and users, many organizationsespecially those with larger and

more sophisticated IT staffshave been most enthusiastic about adopting many of the operational aspects

of cloud computing. But they want these resources behind their own rewalls. Thus, private clouds have

become an area of intense activity.

Whether public, private, or hybrid, this new way of thinking about computing was made possible by a varietyof related but independent trends.

The way that applications get consumed is changing. Network-centric access is the norm. Even core business

applications increasingly use rich, lightweight web-based interfaces rather than requiring heavyweight,

custom apps running on a desk-bound fat client. Client virtualization approaches provide additional access

options such as the increasingly wide range of mobile smartphones and tablets. These new device types are

often largely outside of ITs controla trend that leads to what some call the consumerization of IT. What is

running on the client is decoupled from what is running on the server. This enables client mobility but it also

provides newfound exibility in where the server workloads themselves run.

A second trend relates to scale and complexity. Where once an organizations computer might have

consisted of a single mainframe system or a relative handful of big iron servers, many companies now

measure computing capacity by the datacenter. This scale can create enormous complexity, which is only

somewhat mitigated by the increased standardization of processors, networking, operating systems, andother key technology building blocks.

A third trendand the one that most directly relates to the discussion of IaaS in this paperis virtualiza-

tion. Virtualization dates back to the 1960s, where it shares its roots with some of the earliest time-sharing

research going on in Cambridge, MA. However, it didnt hit the mainstream until it appeared on x86 servers

just about ten years ago. Its popularity has only increased as open source hypervisors such as the kernel-

based virtual machine (KVM) have become an increasingly important part of the virtualization landscape.



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building on and extending virtualization

When it rst came on the scene, the most obvious benet of virtualization was that it improved the utiliza-

tion of physical servers. With processors on their Moores Law-fueled performance uptick, but many appli-

cationsespecially in Windows environmentsunable to co-exist with each other on a single physical server,

virtualization provided a way to isolate workloads without deploying yet another underutilized piece of

hardware.

Virtualization did more than that though. It made the task of deploying new (virtual) servers a relatively

simple point-and-click operation for an admin. No need to order, rack, cable, and provision a physical server.

Further, virtual machines could be moved from one server to anothera far cry from the historical norm

where an application pretty much lived on a particular server until that server was upgraded or retired,

a disruptive process.

However, this improved utilization and VM mobility came at a cost. It was so easy to just re up a new VMthat this happened early and often, with little thought as to how that VM would be maintained and managed

through application upgrades and security patches. The default answer was often just to build yet another

new golden image and re that up. This resulted in VM sprawl and the complexity and IT governance that it

raises cuts deeply into the savings that virtualization would otherwise accrue.

An IaaS cloud, such as Red Hat CloudForms, can build on and extend beyond virtualization to mitigate these

issuesalthough not all IaaS solutions do.

IaaS provides self-service access to users. Its fairly obvious why this would reduce the burden on IT adminis-

trators and help users get on with their jobs faster. As with other forms of self-service such as ATMs, a good

self-service model eliminates a lot of the unproductive friction between the consumer of a service and its

provider. If a usertypically a developercan create their own machine when they need it, without involving

an administrator, they can both win.

Whats less clear is why this wouldnt simply make VM sprawl worse. After all, arent you just making it even

easier to create VMs and reducing further the controls over the process?

The somewhat counterintuitive answer is no. A full-featured IaaS (such as Red Hat CloudForms1) provides

a number of control mechanisms to bring VM sprawl under control.

1 See the whitepaper Red Hat CloudForms Infrastructure-as-a-Service: Build Clouds Without Limits for a detailed description of what it takes

to be a full-featured IaaS product and how Red Hat CloudForms ts those criteria.



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policy and application lifecycle management

The rst such mechanism is a policy engine. Self-service doesnt mean its a free-for-all. You cant do

anything you want at an ATM. Youre restricted to your own account and certain limits are placed on your

transactions; you cant just overdraw $10,000. Similarly, administrators can place limits on which image

templates a given user or group of users can access, where they can run the associated images, and how

much total system resources theyre allowed to consume.

The language thats often used to describe what the user sees is a service catalog. The administrator decides

on the appropriate services to make available to users. These services can be virtual machines. However,

CloudForms also allows administrators to dene services that are aggregations of multiple VMs, as might be

the case with a multi-tier application. For example, a web app service might include a web server, a database,

a message broker, and other components running in separate VMs.

iaas cloudforms lifecycle

Figure 1. Infrastructure-as-a-service should not just deploy images. It should also provide the means to dene those

images with templates, build them so that they can be used across a heterogeneous mix of platforms, and continuously

manage them while they are running.



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An IaaS product with integrated lifecycle management can also maintain control of an image once its

running. For example, within CloudForms, the application engine and system engine components maintainoperational control over the image container (i.e. the VM) and the application and standard operating envi-

ronment content running within the container. The CloudForms application engine provides template-based

management of applications. One or more templates can then be aggregated or associated and given the

operational parameters and congurations needed to boot, initialize, and provide the dened services.

Administrators go to the application engine to dene the applications they want end-users to be able to

deploy. In the case of the system engine, runtime management at the application level means that drifts in

the conguration of applications can be detected and quickly remediated without restarting the application

a key requirement for many types of critical business applications.

Of course, appropriate policies and workows need to be dened by an organization before they can be

implemented. Moving beyond an ad hoc virtualization deployment to a governed private or hybrid cloud

is best approached as a disciplined process. At Red Hat, many of our customers nd a Red Hat Consulting

Pathways engagement helps them adopt the right best practices to complete this process efciently.

However, once this work is done, IaaS provides a great mechanism to operationalize the governance

and automate it.

cutting across silos

A parallel issue is that a virtualization platform can be a path to a new type of IT silo. In the old days, a

system vendor would build everything from processors to systems to operating systems to middleware

to applications. Theres been much standardization at some of these layers. But virtualization platforms

requiring the use of technology from a single vendor start to resemble these monolithic stacks. More and

more organizations have adopted multiple virtualization platforms, 2 solutions that fragment management

and associated skills by virtualization platform or cloud. This practice can greatly diminish the value of a

cloud that acts as an integration and governance point for enterprise IT across physical servers, virtual infra-structure, private, and public clouds.

virtualization platform

Figure 2. By itself, virtualization can lead to new IT silos and VM sprawl.

2 http://gabrielconsultinggroup.com/gcg-news-and-views/20-general-blog/282-open-virtualization-alliance-aims-to-challenge-vmware.html



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Red Hat recognizes that IT infrastructure is and will continue to be composed of pieces from many

different hardware and software vendors that must work together. We recognize that you want to grow andimprove your IT systems and operations gradually and not through wrenching change. And you want to do

so in a way that preserves your strategic exibility and keeps your options open.

The Red Hat approach to IaaS provides you with a consistent runtime environment that you can deploy

in a private or a public cloud, on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or on another vendors virtualization

platformor directly on a physical server. Thats because Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise

Middleware make the cloud usable for enterprise-class applications that you can deploy into the environment

or the mixture of environments that you choose. CloudForms provides a single point of management control

across all these deployment options and even lets you deploy Windows virtual machines to supported desti-

nations as well.

The key point is that the cloud should not be the latest silo in disguise. You should be able to write applica-

tions in your choice of language or framework and deploy them to the public provider or internal platform

of your choice. You should be able to redeploy them if your needs as an organization change or the needsof the application change.

conclusion

Were often asked by customers: How is a private cloud any different from virtualization? Its not

surprising, really, that we hear this. Private and hybrid cloud implementations can, and often should, take

an evolutionary path that builds on virtualization and other installed infrastructure. But its also the case

that these customers have heard a lot of pitches about virtualization dressed up in cloud garb.

Virtualization makes a great foundation for clouds. It is the rst step that many organizations take. But

cloud computing represents a fundamentally higher level of abstraction that lets you start thinking about

computing resources rather than serverseven if they are virtual ones.

At the same time, cloud computing isnt just another layer in a monolithic virtualization stack. It isor should

bea way to help organizations cut across their infrastructure silos and move towards a federated, policy-

driven set of resources that lets IT spend more time on delivering innovation and less time keeping the

lights on.

rEd Hat SalES and inquiriES

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Copyright 2011 Red Hat, Inc. Red H at, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Shadowman logo, JBoss, M etaMatrix,and RHCE are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Linux is the registeredtrademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.

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