Cloud architecture: More questions to ask your provider

In part two of his article on cloud deployment, Gregory Machler offers these questions to ask about infrastructure, platform, and supporting applications

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By Gregory Machler

August 10, 2011 — CSO —

This is a continuation of the previous cloud deployment article where I created architectural questions that enable a consultant to understand what products are used to support a corporation's top 10 critical applications. Once these product lists are created, it is much easier to map private or public cloud products that can support these same applications.

These supporting cloud products are a cloud model for a given customer. A cloud provider wants the various corporate applications to share various cloud products while not sacrificing performance and/or disaster recovery. All cloud model permutations should be tested for disaster recovery so that the customer is sure that this can be done in a realistic and successful manner. As I stated in a previous article, it is critical to deploy products that don't support too many permutations.

For example, one could treat a product like a car model and only have pre-configured 'Gold, Silver, and Bronze' engine configurations. This is critical because it reduces the number of testing configurations. The initial suite of product configuration tests can quickly show that the customer's Service Level Agreement is met.


[Related: Five cloud security trends experts see for 2011]


Here are the infrastructure, platform, and supporting application questions used to support the 10 critical business applications. Some of the questions reveal reliance on one vendor only. Others show a disparity in the release/version of operating systems, embedded hardware model, and embedded release/version of products. Other questions show reliance on critical support products like LDAP directories, Domain Name System products, and key management and encryption products.

So let's look at some key cloud-related questions that do not address storage and networking products addressed in the previous article. This list is not comprehensive but it is a good starting point.

Infrastructure Architecture

  • Which virtual machines are used to support your critical application?
  • What pool of servers do the virtual machines run on?
  • What network equipment integrates with and supports the network policy associated with virtual machines?
  • Is more than one storage subsystem pointed to by the virtualization system, thereby leading to data replication?

Platform Architecture

  • Which servers are dedicated to serving web servers, databases, and application servers?
  • Which vendors are used for the various servers?
  • What operating systems and versions are running on the servers?
  • Which database vendor is used?
  • What database release and version is used?

Web Server

  • Which web server software vendor are you using?
  • What features are critical to the software functioning correctly?
  • How does the web server protect application data?
  • Which DNS product is used to route internet traffic to the appropriate web servers?
  • What release and version of the DNS product is used?

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