Is an abstract model that characterizes and standards the functions of the cloud computing environment. Coro components of the cloud reference architecture include:
- Applications
Is a program or set of programs that are designed to perform a group of coordinated tasks or functions for the benefit of the user. There are two types of applications: Traditional Applications which are unable to support the competitive market due to long development and update and Modern Applications
- Services
Delivering IT resources to the consumers to enable them to achieve the desired business results and outcomes without having any liability. Examples of these services are application hosting, storage capacity file services, and emails. There are two important terminologies in this layer which are:
- Service Catalog – This is a database of information about the services and includes a variety of information about the services, including the description of the services, the type of services, cost, supported SLAs, and security mechanisms.
- Service Portal – Presents information about all the IT resources being offered as services. Displays the service catalog to the consumers.
- Orchestration
Provide workflows for executing, coordinating, and management of automated tasks to accomplish the desired outcome. Workflows refer to a series of inter-related tasks that perform a business operation.
Pay attention that each service in the service catalog has an orchestration workflow.
- Software-Defined Infrastructure
All infrastructure components are virtualized and grouped into pools that abstract all underlying resources from applications, and they can be provisioned on either the virtual or physical resource. It centralizes and automates the management and provisioning of heterogeneous resources based on policies. Key architectural components of the software-defined approach include:
- Software-Defined Compute (SDC)
- Software-Defined Storage (SDS)
- Software-Defined Network (SDN)
- Virtual Infrastructure
Is the process of abstracting physical resources, such as computers, storage, and networking, and creating virtual resources from them to take advantage of the
- Resource consolidation
- Multitenant environment
- Resource utilization
- Increased ROI (Return on investment)
- Flexible resource provisioning
- Rapid elasticity
- Physical infrastructure
Forms the foundation of cloud infrastructure and includes equipment such as computing systems, storage systems, and networking devices along with the operating systems, system software, protocols, and tools that enable physical equipment to perform their functions. Two available options for building the cloud infrastructure are:
- integrating best-of-breed infrastructure components
- acquiring and deploying a converged/hyper infrastructure
- Security
Is a set of practices and policies designed to protect the application, data, and infrastructure associated with cloud computing. Due to the nature of the cloud, various threats arise, and one of the issues that arise with customers is trust!
Trust depends on the degree of control and visibility available to the customer for their data stored in the cloud.
The power of the cloud can be harnessed with the Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) framework.
- Business continuity
Is a set of processes that includes all activities that a business must perform to mitigate the impact of service outages and downtime. Continuous availability is a must for any organization to deliver services to customers in accordance with service level agreements (SLAs).
- Service management
Service management functions specify the adoption of activities related to service portfolio management and service operation management to enable an organization to align the creation and delivery of cloud services to meet their business objective.
- Service Portfolio management
- Defines the service roadmap, service features, and service levels
- Access and prioritize where investments are most needed
- Establish budgeting and pricing
- Deal with consumers in supporting activities such as taking orders, processing bills, and collecting payments.
- Perform market research
- Collect information about competitors
- Service Operation management
- Enable infrastructure configuration and resources
- Enables problem resolution
- Enable capacity and availability management
- Enable compliance conformance
- Enable monitoring cloud services and their constituent elements
These topics will be explained in detail in future posts.