Operations Management for Cloud Infrastructures: 5 Strategies to Consider

Virtualized and dynamic cloud infrastructures present operational challenges to IT teams whether in enterprise organizations or cloud-based service providers. Not only are these virtual infrastructures transient and dynamic - making them harder to monitor and control, they also compel IT organizational silos and processes to interplay in ways that were never required in traditional data center architectures.

Traditional Data Center Management

Traditional data center architectures favored single applications deployed on physical hardware operated at low rates of utilization. Server and application provisioning often took days, if not weeks. Hardware capacities were optimized for peak load with additional safety margins for risk factoring.

For the monitoring and management of traditional data center architectures, a high proportion of the cost was tied up in the initial configuration and deployment of the system. Depending on the size and complexity of the environment, management system deployments could take months - and in some cases even a few years. Once a system was configured for existing infrastructure, change management was complex. As new systems were added they also needed their own configuration, further lengthening the cycle.

Virtualized Data Center Management

With virtualized or cloud systems, physical servers host multiple virtual machines with pooled risk management of resource capacity from multiple, distributed servers. These capacities can be located on-premise in private cloud architectures, or in remote datacenters operated by a 3rd party provider, as a public cloud infrastructure. In both cases, virtual machines and applications running on them are provisioned, operated, augmented with additional resources, moved to different physical servers or locations rapidly - based on fluctuating demand and business service policies. The setup and tear down of additional capacity is done in a span of minutes.

Clearly, the velocity of change in cloud systems is an order of magnitude different from those of traditional datacenters. This demands a new class of management capability, as doing things the old way becomes even more expensive and ultimately infeasible. Consider just the speed of change management required to track new cloud resource provisioning alone. Not all management systems can keep up with the transient nature of cloud infrastructure - resulting in blind spots or gaps in monitoring visibility.

5 Strategies to Consider on Cloud Infrastructure Management

Ensuring successful operations management of cloud infrastructures requires selecting the right management tool attributes, and setting up the appropriate organizational structure, processes and goals.  The five strategies outlined in this article touch all of these aspects, including the adoption of an overarching operational management vision to drive continuous improvement.

1) The Cloud Management system must be flexible and adapt to changing environments

The speed of change in cloud infrastructures is truly unparalleled, particularly compared to traditional data center architectures. The first and foremost requirement of a management system is therefore the ability to manage that change. Regardless of how powerful or sophisticated, if a management system is too complicated to configure, or if it requires manual processes to perform change management - then it is fundamentally misaligned with the dynamic nature of the cloud environment.