Define the cloud computing business advantages.
With emphasis on the following tasks:
D
Provide more efficient utilization of IT resources and reduce hardware cost through resource consolidations and economies-of-scale. Lower total cost of ownership and improving asset utilization.
Dynamic: Resources are dynamically provisioned (or deprovisioned) based on consumer demands.
Reduce IT cycle time and management cost.
Elastic scaling: IT environments scale up and down by any magnitudes as needed to satisfy customer demands.
Optimize IT resource utilization and increase flexibility.
Service Automation Management: IT environments that provide the capability to request, deliver, and manage IT services automatically.
Reduce IT operational costs by automating the processes used to deliver and manage a cloud computing environment.
Pervasiveness: Services are delivered through use of Internet and on any platform.
Improve customer experience by enabling services to be accessed from anywhere and anytime.
Flexible pricing: Services are tracked with usage metrics to enable multiple payment models.
Improve cost transparency and offer more flexible pricing schemes.
Self-service: Cloud service consumers can initiate workload provisioning on-demand.
Improves service delivery by automating the processes used to request workloads.
Define virtualization as it pertains to cloud computing.
With emphasis on the following tasks:
Computing resources (servers, networks, and storage) are dynamically created, expanded, compacted, or moved as demand varies.
Under-utilized physical servers are consolidated into a smaller number of more fully utilized physical servers running virtual workloads.
Virtualization is a key infrastructure element for cloud computing because:
Allows sharing, manageability, and isolation of computing resources.
Significant cost savings via server consolidations and optimal resource utilization.
Provides a way for provisioning a computing resource dynamically and automatically.
Define dynamic infrastructure as it pertains to cloud computing.
With emphasis on the following tasks:
Explain dynamic infrastructure:
Dynamic infrastructure is an information technology paradigm concerning the design of data centers so that the underlying hardware and software can respond dynamically to changing levels of demand in more fundamental and efficient ways than before.
Explain cloud computing's relationship to dynamic infrastructure. Cloud computing is a way to establish a dynamic infrastructure, specifically to optimize the IT infrastructure through virtualization and self service. This helps to reduce cost, efficiently utilize staff and better manage and automate operations while enabling a data center manager to dynamically adjust their IT infrastructure to meet changing demand levels and new business requirements.
Define elasticity as it pertains to cloud computing.
With emphasis on the following tasks:
Explain elasticity as it relates to cloud computing.
A user can create, launch, and terminate server instances as needed, paying by the hour for active servers, hence the term "elastic".
Cloudbursting (capacity over drafting) is automatically adding and subtracting compute and storage capacity on demand to handle workloads in the cloud.
Define the 3 levels of elasticity.
Define the impact of elasticity on workloads deployed in the cloud and explain how they interact with cloud management layer to request / relinquish capacity.
The cloud computing management platform can detect a workload requires more capacity by either receiving messages over a service bus, or monitoring the infrastructure utilization.
The application can receive a signal that additional capacity is now available and scale horizontally.
The application can relinquish unutilized capacity and signal the cloud computing management platform to decommission unused capacity.
Explain the difference between elasticity and scalability.
Elasticity means the platform and the applications running on the platform can handle sudden, unanticipated, and extraordinary workloads.
Scalability is a planned level of capacity, with appropriate overhead that the systems require over time, in addition to the ability to scale in a quick and easy manner.
Define automation as it pertains to cloud computing.
With emphasis on the following tasks:
Automation is a key infrastructure management for cloud computing because without the benefits of automation, the complexity of a cloud environment is increased significantly and thus generate added costs - costs high enough to cancel out the cost savings derived from cloud computing in the first place.
Provides standardization and automation for deployment and management of IT services.
Provides the ability to maintain or improve quality and cost per IT service.
Provides a management stack that is easier to handle and provides for smoother workload migration.
Provides the ability to be audit proof and integrated with process governance.
Provides the ability to reduce costly manual interventions.
Provides the ability for IT to reduce the skill requirements needed for deploying and managing IT services.
Reduces errors caused by manual processes.
Define provisioning as it pertains to cloud computing.
With emphasis on the following tasks:
Provisioning is the automated process of creating, preparing, and configuring computing resources (physical servers, middleware and application server, network, storage space, services, etc.).
Provisioning helps optimize availability by maintaining configurations and managing changes to resources.
Provisioning is used to capture and rerun scenarios of highly complex tasks, thus minimize the potential for human errors.
Explain the trade-offs between provisioning OS image and middleware separately, or with middleware baked into OS image.
When middleware and OS image is provisioned separately version control is easier and independent of each other.
When middleware is baked with OS image, changes are required to the service catalog every time a version has to be changed.
Explain pattern-based provisioning and how it reduces the overall application provisioning time.
With pattern-based provisioning multiple software components needed to support a given application are provisioned and integrated in a single logical step.
Patterns may also address specific needs such as high availability, security or scalability.
Deprovisioning is the automated process of restoring computing resources to their respective resource pools (physical servers, middleware and application server, network, storage space, services, etc.).