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| How IaaS works (basic technical view) |
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| Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS | |
| Written by Administrator | |
| Thursday, 04 February 2010 11:19 | |
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As Stallman says, Cloud Computing is a too broad, too changing concept to talk about it. Cloud Computing is being invented NOW, Amazon was the first known brand of what we now call IaaS, they called it elastyc computing on the first place. As you figured out by yourself, everyone stills inventing IaaS at the moment, there are groups of people working on interoperability and definitions, there are companies developing new Cloud Software, some are new stacks, some are new hypervisors. Even the topology is not exactly the same on every solution, and some are keeping it secret while others go open source.
These are the 5 common elements of almost every IaaS cloud...
That said, there seem to be some clear paterns, or at least some paterns that make sense and some best practices that start to be common and are being succesful on mostly every cloud.
1) The use of intensive virtualization. all clouds I know (but one) use Xen, KVM, VMware, etc... this is intended to reduce costs, using hi performance machines and dividing these into smaller Virtual Machines. The network is virtual (for the user), the storage is virtual...
2) Separated (and optimized?) storage. Storage is also virtualized to some level and storage only machines are added to the cloud network and later bind to the VM's, this allows for persistent storage even after the VM is destroyed. It also optimices the performance of storage intensive apps (at least in theory). Usually there is also some instance level or non virtual storage attached to every VM, thet comes directly from the same machine where the CPU and Memory resources are taken.
3) Automated transparent Virual network. Providing both internal and external IP's for every VM on the cloud and managing connections between your VM´s and between VM´s and the storage servers. This is usually fully automated and network is just transparent to the cloud user.
4) API. All the IaaS cloud infrastructure can be managed via webservices and a Programing Interface. The API allows the creation of web based interfaces for a cloud and for a greater level of automation on the datacenter administration including hardware management directly into your aplications.
5) Monitoring and billing system, pay as you go.
There are more options that are not common to all clouds, and some cloud software don't implement all these 5 points.
For example, newservers.com has full cloud capabilities, but they don't use VM's, instead they use bare metal servers.
Amazon AWS offers a wider range of "cloudified" solutions as database specifics, content services, etc.
While others mix IaaS and PaaS to a level it makes you think if there really is a dividing line.
From my point of view, and only after you think you have a strong opinion on what Cloud Computing is, take a deep look at what IBM is preparing under the "Cloud tag" and start to dream of the future, they're vision is very different and, in my opinion, more advanced than any other, for example take a look at "Stream Computing". But as I said, if you don't want to get even more confused, try to get a clear idea of what it is first, then go to IBM later.
On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 7:25 AM, praveen b <
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Thank you all for all your replies,
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| Last Updated on Thursday, 04 February 2010 11:34 |