openstack-manuals/doc/arch-design/hybrid/section_operational_considerations_hybrid.xml
Andreas Jaeger 831bdec5fd Arch Design: Edits on hybrid
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Add links, fix capitalization, improve markup.

Change-Id: Ifda431c0f7e986d96e72bf5be996235039e3df71
2014-08-03 09:00:38 +02:00

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<section xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
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xml:id="arch-guide-hybrid-operational-considerations">
<?dbhtml stop-chunking?>
<title>Operational considerations</title>
<para>Hybrid cloud deployments present complex operational
challenges. There are several factors to consider that affect
the way each cloud is deployed and how users and operators
will interact with each cloud. Not every cloud provider
implements infrastructure components the same way which may
lead to incompatible interactions with workloads or a specific
Cloud Management Platform (CMP). Different cloud providers may
also offer different levels of integration with competing
cloud offerings.</para>
<para>When selecting a CMP, one of the most important aspects to
consider is monitoring. Gaining valuable insight into each
cloud is critical to gaining a holistic view of all involved
clouds. In choosing an existing CMP, determining whether it
supports monitoring of all the clouds involved or if
compatible APIs are available which can be queried for the
necessary information, is vital. Once all the information
about each cloud can be gathered and stored in a searchable
database, proper actions can be taken on that data offline so
workloads will not be impacted.</para>
<section xml:id="agility"><title>Agility</title>
<para>Implementing a hybrid cloud solution can provide application
availability across disparate cloud environments and
technologies. This availability enables the deployment to
survive a complete disaster in any single cloud environment.
Each cloud should provide the means to quickly spin up new
instances in the case of capacity issues or complete
unavailability of a single cloud installation.</para></section>
<section xml:id="application-readiness-hybrid">
<title>Application readiness</title>
<para>It is important to understand the type of application
workloads that will be deployed across the hybrid cloud
environment. Enterprise workloads that depend on the
underlying infrastructure for availability are not designed to
run on OpenStack. Although these types of applications can run
on an OpenStack cloud, if the application is not able to
tolerate infrastructure failures, it is likely to require
significant operator intervention to recover. Cloud workloads,
however, are designed with fault tolerance in mind and the SLA
of the application is not tied to the underlying
infrastructure. Ideally, cloud applications will be designed
to recover when entire racks and even data centers full of
infrastructure experience an outage.</para></section>
<section xml:id="upgrades">
<title>Upgrades</title>
<para>OpenStack is a complex and constantly evolving collection of
software. Upgrades may be performed to one or more of the
cloud environments involved. If a public cloud is involved in
the deployment, predicting upgrades may not be possible. Be
sure to examine the advertised SLA for any public cloud
provider being used. Note that at massive scale, even when
dealing with a cloud that offers an SLA with a high percentage
of uptime, workloads must be able to recover at short
notice.</para>
<para>Similarly, when upgrading private cloud deployments, care
must be taken to minimize disruption by making incremental
changes and providing a facility to either rollback or
continue to roll forward when using a continuous delivery
model.</para>
<para>Another consideration is upgrades to the CMP which may need
to be completed in coordination with any of the hybrid cloud
upgrades. This may be necessary whenever API changes are made
in one of the cloud solutions in use to support the new
functionality.</para></section>
<section xml:id="network-operation-center-noc">
<title>Network Operation Center</title>
<para>When planning the Network Operation Center (NOC) for a hybrid
cloud environment, it is important to recognize where control
over each piece of infrastructure resides. If a significant
portion of the cloud is on externally managed systems, be
prepared for situations in which it may not be possible to
make changes at all or at the most convenient time.
Additionally, situations of conflict may arise in which
multiple providers have differing points of view on the way
infrastructure must be managed and exposed. This can lead to
delays in root cause and analysis where each insists the blame
lies with the other provider.</para>
<para>It is important to ensure that the structure put in place
enables connection of the networking of both clouds to form an
integrated system, keeping in mind the state of handoffs.
These handoffs must both be as reliable as possible and
include as little latency as possible to ensure the best
performance of the overall system.</para></section>
<section xml:id="maintainability">
<title>Maintainability</title>
<para>Operating hybrid clouds is a situation in which there is a
greater reliance on third party systems and processes. As a
result of a lack of control of various pieces of a hybrid
cloud environment, it is not necessarily possible to guarantee
proper maintenance of the overall system. Instead, the user
must be prepared to abandon workloads and spin them up again
in an improved state. Having a hybrid cloud deployment does,
however, provide agility for these situations by allowing the
migration of workloads to alternative clouds in response to
cloud-specific issues.</para></section>
</section>