Managing the Cloud #1: Cloud Management Principles
Fri, 01/29/2010 - 13:36
guerry
Unlike the traditional "silo" of dedicated servers that host specific applications and services, the cloud promises the easy availability of server resources. Instead of running on one or two statically configured servers, we suddenly have many servers available to us. However, all that flexibility comes at a manageability cost. Way back in July of 2008, I wrote a blog post titled "Will You Manage the Cloud or Will the Cloud Manage You?" In that blog post, I argued that the Cloud required new ways of managing our applications and services, and listed a series of cloud administration requirements. In this article we'll revisit those requirements, and in the series do hands-on work with CloudIQ Platform to see them in action.
In a nutshell, those requirements were:
Install As One: in a single step, install and update applications, services, or resources (libraries, toolkits, etc.) in an atomic manner across many servers, without downtime
Manage As One: enable life-cycle management (start, stop, kill, etc.) of applications and services across many servers as if they were a single entity
Lean On Me: automatically manage dependencies between and versions of applications, services, and resources (libraries, toolkits, etc.) across many servers
Go Configure: enable application configuration across many servers without downtime
Heal Thyself: guided by policy, the cloud self-organizes and self-heals to minimize or reduce any need for administrative intervention in the case of application and/or service failures
In this series we will use Appistry CloudIQ Platform 4.x to build up a cloud-based web application environment using these five principles. Starting from scratch, we will learn how to install, manage, configure and upgrade a software stack on a cloud of N Windows/Linux servers by building up a typical Java-based web application stack:
What other requirements occur to you? I'm interested in discussing and exploring them.
Next time: How CloudIQ Manager handles installations and upgrades