Confused by Capacity in the Cloud? Don't be . . .

Cloud computing comprises of the following three key services:

·         Software as a Service (SaaS)

·         Platform as a Service (PaaS)

·         Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas)

Clouds are typically categorised into External(Public),  in which External Service Providers (ESP) such as Amazon or Google charge for the service (SaaS) or resource usage (PaaS / IaaS) accordingly. 

Internal(Private), in which an organisation will host the services and Hybrid which is a mixture of the two and enables 'cloud bursts' in which services can be ported between external and internal clouds.

In order to be considered a cloud, a service must provide:

·         On demand self service

·         Resource Pooling

·         Rapid Elasticity

Therefore, most if not all External or Internal Cloud Computing physical architecture is underpinned by a virtualization technology, such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft's Hyper-V or Xen.  These technologies provide the above functionality and allow the cloud service providers to 'carve up' their resources as necessary to satisfy the demand of the consumer.

Only the SaaS (Software as a Service) model of cloud computing moves the responsibility for capacity planning to your supplier. If you're buying a platform, infrastructure or an application as a service, it is down to you to make sure you ask for the right resources.

Buy too much and you are perpetuating the over-provisioning mistakes of the distributed era. Buy too little and you bounce from performance crisis to performance crisis and pay the costs of short term fixes. Traditional capacity planning techniques allied to some new considerations are the way to make sure you only pay for what you use.

So how to do we capacity manage an internal cloud environment?  Register for our seminar at Vinopolis on 20^th September in London to find out . . . .. . . . http://www.metron-athene.com/training/seminars/index.html

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant