Challenges in Cloud Environment - New Paradigms in Internet Computing - page 29

Table 1. ( continued )

Easy to
maintain

Somewhat
difficult

Easy to
maintain

Maintainability Easy to maintain RightScale.

User gets
tied up to
RightScale

User gets tied
up to
Eucalyptus

Only usable with
AWS

Lock-in No lock-in Chef/Puppet

Big user
group.
Components
are sharable.

No formal
platform to share
components

Big user group.
Components
are sharable.

Small user
community.

RightScale or
Chef/Puppet

User group

Have to
share cloud
credentials.

No need to
share
credentials

Have to share
cloud
credentials.

No need to share
credentials

Safety Chef/Puppet

4 Conclusion

System quality attributes are the key parameter on which maturity of a cloud service
can be evaluated. Cloud computing still being in a nascent state strives to provide
quality service over this attributes. Evaluation and recommendation in this whitepaper
is based on current state and maturity of various clouds and cloud management tools.
This is subjected to change down the line, considering the fact that cloud technologies
are in evolving state.
Treating Infrastructure as Code for cloud environment would reduce an overhead
to configure and manage the infrastructure manually. Same scripts, with little or no
modifications, could be used to setup an infrastructure in a datacenter. These
scripts/tools are not vendor specific and hence provide a great flexibility and agility.
Scripts are idempotent, cross platform and modular which makes them a reliable to
use.
RHEL migration case discussed in this whitepaper is an apt example on
maintainability issue that one could face on cloud and it also highlights the
importance of treating the Infrastructure as Code.

References and Further Reading

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
[2] http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1345
[3] http://aws.amazon.com/rhel/
[4] http://aws.amazon.com/sqs/
[5] http://aws.amazon.com/rds/
[6] http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
[7] http://www.opscode.com/chef/
[8] http://puppetlabs.com/
[9] http://www.rightscale.com/
[10] http://www.eucalyptus.com/