Cloud Management - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 96

obvious merits and promises of being a cheaper alternative, is still a considerable investment
on the part of the organization, so it is of the utmost importance that you as a customer
know and judge for yourself that you are actually getting your money's worth.
Cloud management platforms (CMPs) are massive software suites that include man-
agement, automation, evaluation, provision, and orchestration solutions that are set up
on top of a virtual infrastructure that may include other cloud environments. Cloud
management solutions also allow customers to see exactly how their system is performing
and how it affects their slice of the cloud as well as the performance of their own virtual
cloud environment. These solutions provide real-time operational intelligence and allow
for the following:
■ Monitoring of system usage and performance, uptime, and various other metrics
■ Fast root-cause analysis of system problems and failures through integrated active
monitoring and report systems
■ Generation of complex yet easy-to-read reports and graphs for various operational
metrics like end-to-end throughput and response times, successful and failed transac-
tions, and message queue lengths
Cloud management systems are able to harness generated machine data from the
cloud infrastructure and applications in order to provide visibility and insight into
operational capacity, problems, and outages and failures as well as performance and
security issues.
The criteria for selecting a cloud management solution is plentiful and may differ
depending on the organization. But here are a few key basic things to look out for:
Governance This is one of the biggest aspects of your management platform because it
gives you total control over your cloud environment. Access controls limit access to specific
resources for certain users or user groups. Financial control allows you to set limits on the
provisioning of resources to keep the operation within budget and prevent overspending.
Security controls with key management and encryption would allow you to segregate roles
and define access rights and privileges in order to impose a separation of roles.
Automation Automation is one of the core features of cloud computing's value proposi-
tion. It allows for quick and reliable deployment of resources and for elasticity and scal-
ability in ever-changing conditions. This helps to realize the reduced costs and agility being
offered by cloud computing. Cloud management platform providers should be offering a
myriad of tools for automation that more than meet the demands of a growing enterprise.
If this has taken a backseat, take a step back from that provider.
Integration Your cloud management platform should not integrate with just the larg-
est and most prevalent cloud service providers; it should be able to integrate with the
smaller ones as well. It is the smaller providers that are often more creative in their
offerings and may offer more value in a specific area, so sometimes it's smart to work
with a few different ones to leverage their strengths in different areas. This creates frag-
mentation, however, and it is the job of the cloud management platform to tie all of this
together seamlessly.