All posts by Sreenivas Makam

Hybrid Cloud

Cloud Platforms, Networking & SDN, Storage & Virtualization, , , , , , ,

In the recent Rightscale survey, 74% of the respondents mentioned that they have a multi-cloud strategy and 48% of the respondents are planning for hybrid clouds. The recent trend in Cloud computing after Public and Private cloud is Hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud offers the best of Private and Public cloud in some scenarios and Enterprises seem to like that.

In this blog, I will cover the following:

  • What is Hybrid cloud and Multi-cloud?
  • Use cases for Hybrid cloud.
  • Components of Hybrid cloud and design considerations – Cloud management, Network connectivity, Application portability
  • Popular Hybrid cloud providers – Rightscale and AWS, Vmware VCHS, Cisco Intercloud, Rackspace hybrid cloud, Redhat open hybrid cloud

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Network Virtualization – Openstack+ODL integration

Cloud Platforms, Networking & SDN, Storage & Virtualization, , ,

In my previous blog, I covered basics of Network Virtualization and overview of commercial solutions available today. The most popular Open source Network Virtualization solution available today is Opendaylight. With the hydrogen release of ODL, ODL can be downloaded in 3 flavors: Base edition, Network Virtualization edition and Service provider edition. Network Virtualization edition adds components like Ovsdb, Opendove, VTN as well as Openstack integration. Ovsdb, Opendove and VTN are different approaches to provide multi-tenant networks. Ovsdb team has put in a nice set of hands-on tutorials for folks wanting to try out Openstack+ODL. I recently tried this out and I was very impressed. In this blog, I will cover my experiences in trying out hands-on Openstack+ODL integration.

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Network Virtualization – Overview and popular commercial solutions

Networking & SDN, Storage & Virtualization, , ,

In this blog, I will cover the following:

  • Overview and need for Network Virtualization
  • Relation between Cloud management and Network Virtualization
  • Network Virtualization approaches
  • Overlay Networks
  • Service chaining
  • Popular Network Virtualization solutions – Vmware NSX, Juniper Opencontrail, Cisco ACI.

Overview and need for Network Virtualization

Network Virtualization allows for abstracting the Networking resources into a logical/software model so that the same set of physical resources can be shared by multiple tenants in a secure and isolated manner. There are 2 kinds of Networking resources, one is the physical resources like Router, Switch and another is appliances like Firewall, Load balancer etc. The appliance can be either physical or virtual. NFV(Network functions virtualization) can be considered a subset of Network Virtualization.

Network Virtualization is similar to Server Virtualization. In server virtualization, compute resources are virtualized, while in network virtualization, networking resources are virtualized. Network virtualization took much longer time to come to the market compared to server virtualization. Following picture gives a good comparison between the 2.

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Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Platforms, Networking & SDN, Storage & Virtualization, , , ,

In this blog, I will cover:

  • Major components of the Cloud infrastructure from hardware perspective
  • 2 models of deploying Cloud infrastructure
  • Overview of different converged infrastructure players and their solutions.
  • Deepdive into VCE converged infrastructure solution.

Major Cloud hardware components are Compute, Storage and Network. There are 2 models of building Cloud infrastructure.

  1. Build using discrete components.
  2. Buy turnkey solution called as Converged Infrastructure.

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Developing and Deploying applications for the Cloud

Cloud Platforms,

In this blog, I will cover the considerations for developing and deploying applications for the Cloud along with the newer deployment models like Devops and Paas based approach.

Developing applications for the cloud is little similar to developing applications for the web but its not exactly the same. In the cloud, there are considerations like failure handling, traffic unpredictability, resource distribution which does not apply to typical web based application. Can we take any enterprise application and directly put them in the cloud and make it an Cloud based application? This normally does not work unless the enterprise application has the cloud application characteristics which I have described below.

Following are some of the important characteristics of a Cloud based application:

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Cloud OS comparison

Cloud Platforms,

In this blog, I will cover basics of Cloud OS, how Enterprise Cloud is different from private/public clouds from Cloud providers and comparison of the major Open source cloud OS available today.

Cloud OS:

Just like Operating system for a desktop or server manages the resources associated with it, Cloud OS manages the resources associated with the cloud. Major cloud resources are compute, storage and network. Compute includes servers and hypervisors associated with the servers that allows for VM creation. Storage includes local storage, Storage area network and Object storage. Network includes vlans, firewalls, load balancers etc. Cloud OS is also responsible for giving the cloud characteristics like Elasticity, self service provisioning model etc. Cloud OS is also responsible for other items like image management, authentication, security, billing etc.

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Accessing AWS Services

Cloud Platforms,

In this blog, I will cover common methods of accessing AWS services using AWS console, AWS CLI and AWS Python SDK. The basic requirement is to have the AWS free account already created.

AWS console:

With AWS console, all activities could be done using the web interface. This approach becomes cumbersome when dealing with hundreds of VMs. Also, we cannot have a programmatic model with this approach.

AWS CLI:

AWS CLI for Windows or Linux can be downloaded from here. Using AWS CLI, all AWS services can be invoked using CLI.

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Amazon AWS overview

Cloud Platforms,

Amazon AWS is the leader in Cloud provider marketspace. AWS started out with IaaS but have also become a PaaS player now.  Amazon’s services extends Computing, Storage, Database, Analytics and Application services. There are multiple granular services under each of the above categories. The best way to get familiar with the cloud services is by trying them out. AWS has an excellent 1 year free tier program where users can try AWS services. The free subscription is with the smallest performance VM and it cannot be used for business purposes, but its a great tool to experiment and get familiar. I could not find the free option with Google compute engine. With Microsoft Azure, they have 1 month trial option.

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