WP_Cloud Analytics - Mapping Requirements to Technology

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Because they try to combine the best of both worlds, hybrid clouds deserve to be described in a bit more detail.

Hybrid clouds allow you to get the following benefits:

• Security, compliance, predictable performance and reliability from private clouds, and

• Horizontal scalability and elasticity, and lower costs of the public cloud.

Uniformity may still be achieved in hybrid clouds, as platform services from a cloud provider may also be

installed on premise: this way, your developers can build applications using a consistent set of services and

DevOps processes and tools, and then deploy data to the location that best meets your security, compliance and

performance requirements. However:

• Hybrid clouds are more complex to implement (so total cost of ownership may be impacted),

• Overall security and compliance is not guaranteed, as organizations must reshape their governance to

ensure data is still properly protected, and

• Success may depend on the maturity of management and maintenance.

4.2 The cloud database management level

At this point we focus our attention on the cloud database at the core of our cloud analytics high level architecture.

There are two different aspects to explore: the service level at which to manage the database, and the specific

type of database technology. At this stage of development of cloud computing technology, these two aspects are

largely independent, as we can now find different types of databases offered both as a service, or available to

install and manage on the cloud on top of infrastructure managed as a service.

This section tackles the level of management aspect, and the next section delves on specific database technology

for your requirements. This first aspect will be useful as well in exploring other two options: hybrid clouds, for

obvious reasons, as well as private clouds, given the similarities that exist between public IaaS services and

private clouds. In what follows, what is said of public IaaS applies to private clouds as well, unless explicitly

pointed out otherwise. The dimensions below are relevant to evaluate this decision.

a. The choice of service level when managing your database seen as a resource –this is part of

Resource

management

, which may depend on your

internal technical skills

With

IaaS

, you get close to the flexibility of an on-premise environment in terms of storage, networking

and computing. You set up your environment: number and size of virtual machines (in terms of number

of cores and size of RAM); then, storage, which is separate from processing power, where you choose

capacity and disk throughput; and finally, network bandwidth and isolation (standard internet, direct

connectivity or virtual private networ

k 3 )

On top of this infrastructure, you then install your database software (your own license or an image you

pay as you go), and you manage it almos

t 4

as usual, assuming responsibility for backing up, configuring

for high availability, monitoring, patching and scaling up (and down) as needed. IaaS services provide

automated features to dramatically simplify these activities. The

Appendix 2

complements our running

example in section

with a cloud platform provider (Microsoft Azure) by providing detail on the

management of the infrastructure layer and the tools available to IT administrators to manage a DBMS

running on VMs.

Cloud infrastructure providers only provides availability SLAs for VMs and not on the software installed

or services provisioned on top of infrastructure. Typical SLAs are in the 99.9% uptime range, which

VPNs are used to connect to public clouds. Private clouds are usually accessed from on premises through a physically isolated network, so this does not apply to private

clouds.

Management is not exactly as usual when compared to on premise: for instance, reasons for enabling backup no longer include protection against media or hardware failures,

as the IaaS VM service provides this already (private clouds also do).