Cloud 2.0

BECOME CLOUD-READY 2.0

The cloud is ready and waiting, with new economics that can power your company to faster differentiation and discoveries. Bring cloud computing into your portfolio to provide a new means of business agility, flexibility, and cost optimization. The sooner your organization starts down this learning curve, the faster and more dramatically you can gain competitive advantage. But first you must:

• Adapt to the cloud; don't expect it to adapt to you. For cloud services to deliver the economic and time-to-market advantages, they must be generic enough to deliver the same service to all customers — that's how economies of scale work. That means that if the cloud provider doesn't provide a capability you require, such as security services, you should be prepared to supplement its service. As you evolve your cloud use policy and deployment procedures, be sure to incorporate the adaptations your company requires.

• Make sure your developers design for elasticity. Breaking your HPC project into as many loosely coupled, scalable components as possible will let you maximize the cloud's scale-up and scale-down advantage. And, small VMs in IaaS clouds cost far less than larger ones, so break large applications down into smaller, discrete components that take with them only the data they need to act on in each cycle.

• Simplify cloud access through single sign-on integration. Most cloud platforms support LDAP, OpenID, or direct Active Directory integration. And the majority provide role-based access controls to your cloud resources. This step will help ensure that those using the cloud match corporate policies and will let you relieve your developers of managing their own accounts and help you centralize and better secure cloud access.

• Create a cloud release management process. Cloud is not a panacea to the sometimes complex operating system and platform configurations required by HPC. In IaaS, you must manage the VM images so that new releases can be deployed in the cloud for testing prior to a production release. Build a library of master VMs that includes your standard software loads, including any security agents or other elements you need to secure a cloud deployment.

• Monitor cloud activities. A key value IT ops can bring is the ability to help HPC groups solve availability, performance, and scalability issues. Most cloud platforms provide basic monitoring services and output logs from their virtual infrastructures. Make sure you're capturing these in a way that you can make sense of or provide them to the developers for self-diagnosis and adaptations where necessary.

• Source - Forrester