How to build a cloud: Part 1

Some vendors, like VMware, will tell you it’s really easy to build a cloud. Just grab a couple servers, install hypervisors, slice off a storage LUN and you are off to the races. What was called a virtualized infrastructure yesterday is now called a cloud. I guess clouds sell more licenses. It just ain’t that easy folks.

Vendors are confused. They think cloud computing is a technology. It isn’t. It’s a business methodology that leverages technology and business process. You can’t buy it in a box. Trust me; I’ve looked at a lot of boxes lately.

So how do you go about building a cloud computing platform? Well a cloud has four basic components:

The virtualization layer, data storage, and computing components are fairly straightforward. You can buy most of these commodity pieces off the shelf. The management system is the most difficult component to build or purchase. Let’s look at these cloud components in more detail.

It seems like virtualization and clouds are almost synonymous these days. Virtualization is a technology and cloud computing is a business methodology. I’m going to keep hammering that point home so bear with me. The reason these terms are confused is because pretty much every cloud computing platform uses some form of virtualization technology. Can you build a cloud without using virtualization? I guess. Heck service providers are calling almost anything they sell a cloud these days. In reality it’s hard to build a cloud without using some form of virtualization. One of the main features of a cloud is infrastructure abstraction — or the virtualization of the infrastructure from the perspective of the cloud user. Virtualization technologies are simply the easiest, cheapest, and most efficient way to provide this type of abstraction layer.

So which virtualization technology should you use to build a cloud? The first thing to understand is that from the perspective of the user the virtualization layer does not matter. It really doesn’t. Cloud users could care less whether your cloud employs VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V virtualization technology. The users only care about service availability and performance. So don’t pick a virtualization technology based on market share or public awareness. Ultimately the cloud virtualization technology should be based on your cloud management platform. The management platform will manage the provisioning and configuration of infrastructure within your virtualization layer. So it’s critical that the management platform and virtualization technology work together.

You could pick VMware as the virtualization layer because you plan to build a cloud management platform around vCenter and the VMWare APIs. The same goes for Hyper-V and Microsoft Systen Center Virtualization Manager. Or maybe you want to build a management platform around Xen and the Citrix C3 doohickey. The key point is that the cloud management platform really drives the virtualization technology decision. I’ll talk more about the management platform in a bit.

(To Be Continued)