openstack-manuals/doc/arch-design/hybrid/section_user_requirements_hybrid.xml
Andreas Jaeger 831bdec5fd Arch Design: Edits on hybrid
General edits, especially:
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"
version="5.0"
xml:id="user-requirements-hybrid">
<?dbhtml stop-chunking?>
<title>User requirements</title>
<para>Hybrid cloud architectures introduce additional
complexities, particularly those that use heterogeneous cloud
platforms. As a result, it is important to make sure that
design choices match requirements in such a way that the
benefits outweigh the inherent additional complexity and
risks.</para>
<para>Business considerations to make when designing a hybrid
cloud deployment include:</para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>Cost</term>
<listitem>
<para>A hybrid cloud architecture involves multiple
vendors and technical architectures. These
architectures may be more expensive to deploy and
maintain. Operational costs can be higher because of
the need for more sophisticated orchestration and
brokerage tools than in other architectures. In
contrast, overall operational costs might be lower by
virtue of using a cloud brokerage tool to deploy the
workloads to the most cost effective platform.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Revenue opportunity</term>
<listitem>
<para>Revenue opportunities vary
greatly based on the intent and use case of the cloud.
If it is being built as a commercial customer-facing
product, consider the drivers for building it over
multiple platforms and whether the use of multiple
platforms make the design more attractive to target
customers, thus enhancing the revenue
opportunity.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Time to market</term>
<listitem>
<para>One of the most common reasons to
use cloud platforms is to speed the time to market of
a new product or application. A business requirement
to use multiple cloud platforms may be because there
is an existing investment in several applications and
it is faster to tie them together rather than
migrating components and refactoring to a single
platform.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Business or technical diversity</term>
<listitem>
<para>Organizations
already leveraging cloud-based services may wish to
embrace business diversity and utilize a hybrid cloud
design to spread their workloads across multiple cloud
providers so that no application is hosted in a single
cloud provider.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Application momentum</term>
<listitem>
<para>A business with existing
applications that are already in production on
multiple cloud environments may find that it is more
cost effective to integrate the applications on
multiple cloud platforms rather than migrate them to a
single platform.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
<section xml:id="legal-requirements-hybrid">
<title>Legal requirements</title>
<para>Many jurisdictions have legislative and regulatory
requirements governing the storage and management of data in
cloud environments. Common areas of regulation include:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Data retention policies ensuring storage of
persistent data and records management to meet data
archival requirements.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Data ownership policies governing the possession and
responsibility for data.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Data sovereignty policies governing the storage of
data in foreign countries or otherwise separate
jurisdictions.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Data compliance policies governing certain types of
information needs to reside in certain locations due
to regular issues and, more importantly, cannot reside
in other locations for the same reason.</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>Examples of such legal frameworks include the data
protection framework of the European Union (<link
xlink:href="http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/">http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/</link>)
and the requirements of the Financial Industry Regulatory
Authority (<link
xlink:href="http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/">http://www.finra.org/Industry/Regulation/FINRARules/</link>)
in the United States. Consult a local regulatory body for more
information.</para>
</section>
<section xml:id="workload-considerations">
<title>Workload considerations</title>
<para>Defining what the word "workload" means in the context of a
hybrid cloud environment is important. Workload can be defined
as the intended way the systems will be utilized, which is
often referred to as a "use case". A workload can be a single
application or a suite of applications that work in concert.
It can also be a duplicate set of applications that need to
run on multiple cloud environments. In a hybrid cloud
deployment, the same workload will often need to function
equally well on radically different public and private cloud
environments. The architecture needs to address these
potential conflicts, complexity, and platform
incompatibilities.</para>
<para>Some possible use cases for a hybrid cloud architecture
include:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Dynamic resource expansion or "bursting": Another
common reason to use a multiple cloud architecture is
a "bursty" application that needs additional resources
at times. An example of this case could be a retailer
that needs additional resources during the holiday
selling season, but does not want to build expensive
cloud resources to meet the peak demand. They might
have an OpenStack private cloud but want to burst to
AWS or some other public cloud for these peak load
periods. These bursts could be for long or short
cycles ranging from hourly, monthly or yearly.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Disaster recovery-business continuity: The cheaper
storage and instance management makes a good case for
using the cloud as a secondary site. The public cloud
is already heavily used for these purposes in
combination with an OpenStack public or private
cloud.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Federated hypervisor-instance management: Adding
self-service, charge back and transparent delivery of
the right resources from a federated pool can be cost
effective. In a hybrid cloud environment, this is a
particularly important consideration. Look for a cloud
that provides cross-platform hypervisor support and
robust instance management tools.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Application portfolio integration: An enterprise
cloud delivers better application portfolio management
and more efficient deployment by leveraging
self-service features and rules for deployments based
on types of use. A common driver for building hybrid
cloud architecture is to stitch together multiple
existing cloud environments that are already in
production or development.<!-- In the interest of time to
market, the requirements may be to maintain the
multiple clouds and just integrate the pieces
together, not rationalize to one cloud environment, but
instead to --></para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Migration scenarios: A common reason to create a
hybrid cloud architecture is to allow the migration of
applications between different clouds. This may be
because the application will be migrated permanently
to a new platform, or it might be because the
application needs to be supported on multiple
platforms going forward.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>High availability: Another important reason for
wanting a multiple cloud architecture is to address
the needs for high availability. By using a
combination of multiple locations and platforms, a
design can achieve a level of availability that is not
possible with a single platform. This approach does
add a significant amount of complexity.</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>In addition to thinking about how the workload will work on
a single cloud, the design must accommodate the added
complexity of needing the workload to run on multiple cloud
platforms. The complexity of transferring workloads across
clouds needs to be explored at the application, instance,
cloud platform, hypervisor, and network levels.</para></section>
<section xml:id="tools-considerations-hybrid">
<title>Tools considerations</title>
<para>When working with designs spanning multiple clouds, the
design must incorporate tools to facilitate working across
those multiple clouds. Some of the user requirements drive the
need for tools that will do the following functions:</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Broker between clouds: Since the multiple cloud
architecture assumes that there will be at least two
different and possibly incompatible platforms that are
likely to have different costs, brokering software is
designed to evaluate relative costs between different
cloud platforms. These solutions are sometimes
referred to as Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs).
Examples include Rightscale, Gravitent, Scalr,
CloudForms, and ManageIQ. These tools allow the
designer to determine the right location for the
workload based on predetermined criteria.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Facilitate orchestration across the clouds: CMPs are
tools are used to tie everything together. Cloud
orchestration tools are used to improve the management
of IT application portfolios as they migrate onto
public, private, and hybrid cloud platforms. These
tools are an important consideration. Cloud
orchestration tools are used for managing a diverse
portfolio of installed systems across multiple cloud
platforms. The typical enterprise IT application
portfolio is still comprised of a few thousand
applications scattered over legacy hardware,
virtualized infrastructure, and now dozens of
disjointed shadow public Infrastructure-as-a-Service
(IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers and
offerings.</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist></section>
<section xml:id="network-considerations-hybrid">
<title>Network considerations</title>
<para>The network services functionality is an important factor to
assess when choosing a CMP and cloud provider. Considerations
are functionality, security, scalability and HA. Verification
and ongoing testing of the critical features of the cloud
endpoint used by the architecture are important tasks.</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>Once the network functionality framework has been
decided, a minimum functionality test should be
designed. This will ensure testing and functionality
persists during and after upgrades.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Scalability across multiple cloud providers may
dictate which underlying network framework you will
choose in different cloud providers. It is important
to have the network API functions presented and to
verify that functionality persists across all cloud
endpoints chosen.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>High availability implementations vary in
functionality and design. Examples of some common
methods are active-hot-standby, active-passive and
active-active. High availability and a test framework
needs to be developed to insure that the functionality
and limitations are well understood.</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>Security considerations include how data is secured
between client and endpoint and any traffic that
traverses the multiple clouds, from eavesdropping to
DoS activities.</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist></section>
<section xml:id="risk-mitigation-management-hybrid">
<title>Risk mitigation and management
considerations</title>
<para>Hybrid cloud architectures introduce additional risk because
they add additional complexity and potentially conflicting or
incompatible components or tools. However, they also reduce
risk by spreading workloads over multiple providers. This
means, if one was to go out of business, the organization
could remain operational.</para>
<para>Risks that will be heightened by using a hybrid cloud
architecture include:</para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>Provider availability or implementation details</term>
<listitem>
<para>
This can range from the company going out of business
to the company changing how it delivers its services.
Cloud architectures are inherently designed to be
flexible and changeable; paradoxically, the cloud is
both perceived to be rock solid and ever flexible at
the same time.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Differing SLAs</term>
<listitem>
<para>Users of hybrid cloud environments
potentially encounter some losses through differences
in service level agreements. A hybrid cloud design
needs to accommodate the different SLAs provided by
the various clouds involved in the design, and must
address the actual enforceability of the providers'
SLAs.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Security levels</term>
<listitem>
<para>Securing multiple cloud
environments is more complex than securing a single
cloud environment. Concerns need to be addressed at,
but not limited to, the application, network, and
cloud platform levels. One issue is that different
cloud platforms approach security differently, and a
hybrid cloud design must address and compensate for
differences in security approaches. For example, AWS
uses a relatively simple model that relies on user
privilege combined with firewalls.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Provider API changes</term>
<listitem>
<para>APIs are crucial in a hybrid
cloud environment. As a consumer of a provider's cloud
services, an organization will rarely have any control
over provider changes to APIs. Cloud services that
might have previously had compatible APIs may no
longer work. This is particularly a problem with AWS
and OpenStack AWS-compatible APIs. OpenStack was
originally planned to maintain compatibility with
changes in AWS APIs. However, over time, the APIs have
become more divergent in functionality. One way to
address this issue is to focus on using only the most
common and basic APIs to minimize potential
conflicts.</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</section>
</section>