Migrating Clouds – Cloud Expo

 November 9. 2011, Cloud Expo, Santa Clara, CA–Garima Thockchom from Gale Technologies talked about moving operations into a cloud architecture. This will work in public, private, and hybrid modes with the main priority being increased utilization and agility.

The definition of a cloud is a system that has multiple users who are able to schedule and provision the shared infrastructure. Automatic provisioning and decommissioning, response reports and operating management are all part of this self-service operation.

Here are some could myths: clouds increase virtualization, you have to re-architect your applications, you have to go to a “cookie-cutter” hardware and software stack, orchestration is complex, and clouds require expensive service contracts.

The IT environment is a collection of computers, networks, storage, and software. Transition to a public cloud requires intelligent orchestration, the use of pre-built adapters, and a self-service portal. The intelligent orchestration can pick up resources, provision them, de-provision them and return them to the resource pool. This management functions increases automation

Virtual and non-virtual resources and the end-to-end orchestration to manage them, need built-in intelligence from the system. Part of this intelligence comes from a library of pre-built adapters and service templates which allow the system to automatically provision resources. The best ones are customizable to your specific requirements.

Newer capabilities coming on to the market include resource and capacity reservations and calendaring to allow a user to set up a resource pool before it is actually needed. These functions make it easier for users to become more comfortable with clouds and also can prevent very large jobs from being preempted or interrupted while processing. Better visibility into the total system requirements helps both users and IT managers.