Cloudware Operations and Management - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 374

there is an access issue. In such situations, frustration increases exponen-
tially with time, partly because of the opacity. Is a mechanism like a network
weather map, in other words, some form of monitoring solution like autono-
mous agents, required?
18.2.4.2 Data Migration
Data migration between data centers or cloud systems are important con-
cerns of taxonomy. While migrating data, some considerations should be
taken into account like no data loss, availability, scalability, cost efficiency,
and load balancing. Users should be able to move their data and applications
any time from one to another seamlessly, without any one vendor control-
ling it. Seamless transfer, as in mobile communication, is required for cloud
computing to work. Many enterprises do not move their mission-critical data
and applications to the cloud because of vendor lock-in, security, governance,
and many more complications.
18.2.5 Management Services
The management services contain deployment, monitoring, reporting,
service-level agreement, and metering billing. We discuss these in detail.
18.2.5.1 Deployment and Configuration
To reduce the complexity and administrative burden across the cloud
deployment, we need the automation process life cycle. RightScale Cloud
Management Platform addresses three stages of the cloud application
deployment lifecycle, namely, design, manage, and deploy. Automated con-
figuration and maintenance of individual or networked computers, from the
policy specification, is very important in the computing arena; it improves
robustness and functionality without sacrificing the basic freedoms and
self-repairing concepts. That is why, to handle complex systems like cloud
environment and data center, we need such configuration management.
Configuration management framework tools help software developers and
engineers to manage server and application configuration by writing code,
rather than running commands by hand.
18.2.5.2 Monitoring and Reporting
Developing, testing, debugging, and studying the performance of cloud
systems are quite complex. Management cost increases significantly as the
number of sites increases. To address such problems, we need monitoring
and reporting mechanisms. Monitoring basically monitors the SLA lifecycle.
It also determines when an SLA completes and reports to the billing ser-
vices. There are some services that monitor the cloud systems and produce