Configuration Management Software Analytics To Tackle Private Clouds Challenges

By Author: Sasha Gilenson
Total Articles: 3
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For users outside of IT, private clouds can offer resources that seem “effectively limitless,” and are really good at automating change. If someone needs a new server or 100 new servers, private clouds are a great way to rapidly deliver required resources on a self-service basis. For applications that need to scale up and down, they are a great way to automate that scaling.

Private Cloud Flexibility

Organizations that have made a significant investment in virtualization and in running large-scale virtual environments are well-equipped to move toward a private cloud model. Large companies with hundreds of departments all placing heavy demands on IT are excited about leveraging clouds. The self-service, automation and chargeback capabilities of a private cloud stand to make a huge difference.

One Size Does Not Fit All

While private cloud solutions can give the appearance of intelligence and flexibility, the diverse demands put on the infrastructure by different teams and departments can quickly lead to major configuration management challenges and conflicting settings and misconfigurations. ...
... Based on automation, there are various open source and commercial platforms providing management solutions for handling the diverse requirements of private clouds. However none of them effectively close the management loop.

Diversification Brings Complexity

Even the most basic clouds, such as those supporting development efforts, still have a diverse set of users. Some developers, when writing code, might need a Software Development Environment (SDE) linked to a runtime environment that supports multi-tier applications. Other people in QA might need a single instance of an application, rapidly reconstructed. Scalability testers would need simulation environments to test thousands of users and transactions.

Flexibility?

The private cloud maintains libraries of images or templates used as a foundation for the setup of required resources. There are two paths an organization can take – limit the base images to operating systems allowing the users to deploy required software layer on top or providing the whole software stack out of the box.

In the first case the image library can remain relatively small and static, however a significant amount of changes will need to be applied to build and operate an environment.

In the second option there will be less changes and they will be controlled with less effort, however the flexibility of spun off environments will be limited as well. In this case an extensive set of images or templates may be required to address various organization requirements. Managing extensive changes or extensive image library is a huge challenge that can overwhelm most IT operations and configuration management groups.

Infrastructure Management
The private cloud is supposed to be a self-service entity that provides teams outside of IT a secure platform to run, launch and develop on. It runs without end-to-end supervision. However with more teams tweaking and changing configurations, the system loses its reliability. When IT operations gives flexibility to teams of developers or QA, the system can quickly unravel. One request begets another, and users begin to ask for tweaks and changes to make the private cloud service better for them. Once that image has been tweaked, why not make it available to the next fellow who wants the same modification? Rapidly, the volume grows. Users might get what they want, but at the expense of having an effectively working platform.

Configuration Management Software Analytics

What is the solution? Flexibility or control?
Despite the self-service nature, a private cloud implementation needs reporting and monitoring tools, to stay on top of actual environment configuration. Yet tracking the end-to-end configuration of such dynamic environments can produce an overwhelming amount of data. To effectively keep clouds on course, a configuration management software and configuration management analytics engine needs to process this evolution of overwhelming, complex configuration for various environment components. Then the analytics system needs to derive actionable information that will allow the IT operations staff to maintain environment stability and performance.