Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
given point in time user has a flexibility to move out of AWS cloud to any other cloud or
traditional data-centre. Though there are PaaS services provided by AWS, if used, would
require change in application architecture and that in turn would mean vendor lock-in.
b)
Recommendation
:
There are no open standards. Cloud users have to keep this
constraint in mind while designing the application, so that they don't get locked-
in with the vendor. AWS provides support for application portability as long as
PaaS services are not used.
1.2
Recoverability
It's the ease with which the infrastructure and application could be recovered in case
of a disaster and/or threat to Business continuity.
a)
Description:
Services provided by cloud vendors are unique to their
implementation. The compute node management, back-up procedures, firewall
implementation, is different for all the vendors. Considering these facts
application recoverability could be a time consuming.
It is quintessential in today's fast growing business environment to automate IT
provisioning. Managing and configuring the IT infrastructure is one of the most time
consuming and error prone task. The desire to implement something that would make
the paradigm shift has given birth to a concept which treats Infrastructure
management as Code. This transition, from traditional server maintenance to
automation, would make the building and maintaining a modern infrastructure
environment look more like maintaining a software project. AWS provides a service
called CloudFormation [Ref 6] using which a user can rebuild the whole of
infrastructure right from the scratch without much of human intervention.
Treating the Infrastructure as Code has been widely acknowledged. There are
certain service providers/technologies which offer Infrastructure management.
They are:
1.
Chef [Ref 7]
2.
Puppet [Ref 8]
3.
RightScale [Ref 9]
4.
Eucalyptus [Ref 10]
b)
Recommendation:
It is recommended that Chef or Puppet should be used be it
any infrastructure environment. These tools come handy for the purpose of
recoverability and maintainability. AWS and Azure along with cloud
management tool provides a unique way to manage cloud servers. The pros and
cons of each of these tools have been discussed in details in coming sections.
1.3
Maintainability
It is the ease with which the application environment could be maintained.
a)
Description:
One of the biggest motivation factors for organizations to move onto
cloud from traditional data-centre is maintainability. Users need not to worry
