Usage Scenario:
During many phased of SDLC, there is a need to create hardware and software environments repeatedly to perform development, integration testing, system testing and user acceptance testing. This repeated deployment of hardware and software takes lot of time and eats into the bandwidth of today’s delivery organization to focus on the core responsibility of delivering tested application.
Delivery organization also needs to provision and re-provision hardware and software for ever increasing requirements of development and testing in addition to the resources. Also, setting up of separate hardware and software takes time as well as prone to configuration errors. Plus, separate hardware installations consumes space which is at a premium.
Solution:
The solution to above mentioned usage pain points is to setup private cloud. Eucalyptus, an open source private cloud provider provides software that can be deployed to setup private cloud within the organization’s internal premises.
Eucalyptus is software that implements scalable IaaS-style private and hybrid clouds. Eucalyptus implements the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API which allows interoperability with existing AWS-compatible services and tools.
The Eucalyptus private cloud brings following capability to the organization:
· Standardization of virtual machines appliance. This means that a standard stack of operating system, web servers, databases are pre-grouped as a set and can be deployed on demand by the internal users of the organization.
· Elimination of configuration errors while creating consistent development and test environments in terms of hardware and software configurations
· Significant savings on cost for space and time to deploy the infrastructure
· The deployment requests can be automated using a workflow and charge mechanisms can be created for the inventory of software and hardware for various departments within the organization.
Eucalyptus private cloud architecture:
The above diagram shows different components that make a Eucalyptus cloud cluster. The components are Cloud Controller, Walrus, Cluster Controller, Node Controller and Storage Controller.
The Cloud Controller provides Amazon Web Services like interface to control and manage the cloud. Walrus component is similar to AWS S3 storage and provides bucket like storage to user of cloud. Cluster controller manages the network of nodes in the cluster and storage controller manages AWS EBS kind of storage for the cloud. Every node in the cluster will be required to install Node Controller to manage each node and interact with the Cluster Controller.
Typical Configuration:
If you want to tryout the feature of Eucalyptus private cloud, you can create a 2 machine cluster as a minimum.
You can deploy a typical Eucalyptus installation in a 2 machine configuration. The components Cloud Controller, Walrus, Cluster Controller and Storage Controller reside on one machine. The other machine will contain Node controller.
Both the machines have Server Operating System as Ubuntu 10.04. The Ubuntu OS has option to deploy private Enterprise Cloud. The installation steps are given in the references section.
Conclusion:
Private Enterprise Cloud will change the way in which the computing is currently done in the Enterprises as well as Delivery organizations. Private Enterprise Cloud brings flexibility in configuration management and deployment management. Coming quarters will see significant adoption of Private Enterprise Cloud as the de-facto platform for infrastructure management or Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS).
References:
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