The evolution of cloud computing: how to plan for change

208 Pages·2017·9.181 MB·English

by  Longbottom, Clive

THE EVOLUTION OF CLOUD
COMPUTING
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THE EVOLUTION OF CLOUD
COMPUTING
How to plan for change
Clive Longbottom
© BCS Learning & Development Ltd 2017
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iv
CONTENTS
List of figures ix
About the Author x
Foreword xi
Acknowledgements xii
Abbreviations xiii
Glossary xvii
Preface xxiii
PART 1 LOOKING BACK: CLOUD COMPUTING IN CONTEXT 1
1. BACKGROUND 3
Looking backward to look forward 3
The price war 4
The rise of the PC 5
Changing to a distributed model 6
Web computing to the fore 7
The rise of the age of chaos 8
Virtualisation, service-oriented architecture and grid computing 8
The role of standards 10
Summary 11
PART 2 T HE CLOUD NOW: CLOUD AT ITS SIMPLEST, AS IT SHOULD BE
IMPLEMENTED 13
2. THE CLOUD 15
Back to the future 15
Summary 21
3. WHY CLOUD? 23
Resource utilisation 23
Cost 26
Meeting future needs 28
Workload portability 29
High availability 31
Summary 31
4. BASIC CLOUD PLATFORMS 32
Popular cloud platforms 32
The architecture of a cloud 36
v
CONTENTS
Open compute project 39
Summary 40
5. ALTERNATIVE CLOUD PLATFORMS 41
Private and public cloud offerings 41
Container platforms 45
The current chaos of cloud 47
Summary 52
6. ALTERNATIVE CLOUD MODELS 54
Cloud broker 54
Cloud aggregator 55
Summary 56
7. MAIN TYPES OF SaaS CLOUD SERVICES 58
SaaS cloud services 58
File share and sync 59
Shadow IT 61
Summary 64
8. WHERE SHOULD A CLOUD PLATFORM RESIDE? 65
Private clouds 65
Where should private clouds be based? 65
Hybrid clouds 66
The organisational value chain 68
The use of colocation facilities 69
Data centre and cloud tiering 70
Summary 73
9. PAYING FOR CLOUD SERVICES 74
The battle between cost levels and their predictability, and
business flexibility 74
Basic cost models 75
Increasing cost model complexity 76
Cost tiering 77
Summary 80
PART 3 T HE VERY NEAR FUTURE: CLOUD AT A MORE COMPLEX LEVEL,
AS YOU SHOULD BE IMPLEMENTING IT 81
10. BUILDING THE RIGHT CLOUD 83
Mixing clouds 83
Planning for workload migrations 84
It’s all about the process 85
Summary 88
11. ISSUES WITH CLOUD COMPUTING 89
System availability 89
Data security 91
Performance 92
vi
CONTENTS
The need for standards and APIs 94
‘Noisy neighbours’ 95
The business issues of highly dynamic cloud-based systems 97
Software and usage licensing issues 99
The mirage of self-service 101
The cessation of service by a provider 102
Maintaining governance in a hybrid cloud 105
Summary 106
12. CLOUD AND THE ‘CDs’ 107
Why use CD? 107
DevOps flows 108
Summary 109
13. CREATING THE BUSINESS CASE FOR THE CLOUD 111
Total value proposition 111
Summary 118
14. SCALE OUT, SCALE UP AND SCALE THROUGH 119
Building the right cloud platform 119
The cloud and ‘software defined’ 121
The power of idempotency 122
Converged and hyperconverged systems 123
Summary 125
15. CLOUD AND DATA 127
Data sovereignty 127
Data flows 128
Database issues 129
Distance and latency 130
High availability 130
Summary 131
16. CLOUD SECURITY 133
The myth of data security in private data centres 133
Assume that security is breached 135
Data classification 136
The badly protected walled garden 138
The importance of multi-factor single sign-on 140
Edge security 142
Physical security 143
Summary 144
17. VIRTUALISATION, SHARABLE RESOURCES AND ELASTICITY 145
The lure of virtualisation 145
The move to cloud 146
Scaling for massive use: G-Cloud 148
Summary 149
vii
CONTENTS
18. THE CHANGE IN APPLICATIONS 151
The death of the monolith 151
The need for technical contracts 152
Summary 155
19. APPLICATIONS, VIRTUAL MACHINES AND CONTAINERS 156
The differences between virtual machines and containers 156
The future for containers 160
Summary 161
20. FULL AUDIT IS REQUIRED 162
The importance of a full audit 162
Summary 166
21. MONITORING, MEASURING AND MANAGING THE CLOUD 167
Modern levels of standardisation and abstraction 167
Choosing an over-arching system to manage chaos 168
Automate for effectiveness and efficiency 169
Summary 169
PART 4 T HE FUTURE OF CLOUD: CLOUD AS YOU SHOULD BE PLANNING
FOR IT IN THE FURTHER-OUT FUTURE 171
22. THE ULTIMATE FUTURE 173
The evolution of the cloud 173
Summary 174
23. IN CONCLUSION 175
Index 176
viii