learnquest learning library content · 2016. 6. 17. · ther efore, in this unit, you will learn...

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Unit 8 is going to discuss multiple services of a cloud.

Unit 8: Multiple services of a cloud

LearnQuest Learning Library Content


Review the objectives for this unit.



You should be aware of these basic cloud services from prior units in this course:

• Infrastructure as a Service

• Platform as a Service

• Software as a Service

• Business Process as a Service

Multitudes of service offerings come from these basic services. In this class, you started at the infrastructure level. Therefore, in this unit, you will learn about the infrastructure services that are provided by Cloud Manager Administration Dashboard. The Cloud Manager Self-Service interface provides services in the format of a catalog for ordering items. With extra work in building the items, you can provide some limited forms of Platform services.





As a cloud administrator, your first task is to configure resources in the cloud environment. In order to have good configurations, you need to have an overview of the resource usage. The visual shows an example of selecting a period of dates for viewing usage of the below:

• Instances or virtual machines

• Disk or storage

• RAM or memory

In units of virtual CPU-hours or Giga byte-hours. A table shows usage by project. You can download this data as a file in comma-separated values (CSV) format.




Although different cloud manager software products provide different services for the tasks, basic administration functions are similar. IBM Cloud Manager uses the services that originate from OpenStack. The Dashboard lets administrator work with hypervisors in the cloud. Hypervisors provide computing resources. Cloud administrators also work with network and storage resources.



When you learn to work with resources in the virtualization environment, you are promised that you can do most of the tasks in the cloud. An administrator who knows about virtualization might become a cloud administrator. Now you might work with multiple virtualization environments in the cloud. You also provide these tasks as services for other administrators or users. Your next group of tasks is for creating user accounts and workspaces.




User identities and accounts in a cloud environment are different from the ones in virtualization environments. Although, most cloud manager software works with user directory databases to help manage users. It is inevitable that new user accounts and workspaces are needed in a cloud. Therefore, cloud supports different user roles and rules for working spaces. The purposes are for an environment with secured workspaces and accesses of resources.




Project is a way of organizing workspaces for users, who need to work with virtual machines, virtual images, and so on. These users have administrative or development roles in the project. Planning out user access and security policies is important. The Orchestration templates and developing environment helps build automation and workflow processes.




In the Cloud Manager databases, user accounts and projects are data structures or objects that represent real life users and workspaces. Imagine each data object has properties that specify object relationships for example. A resource object with public property can be seen or accessed from any project. A private resource object belongs only to a particular project. An example of project isolation is that a user in Project A might not know any user in Project B.




The visual shows an example when an image is created in Cloud Manager. You can select the property: public or protected. A public image can be accessed from any project. A protected image is still under construction by the administrator. It can be made available later.




The visual shows an example when a network is created in Cloud Manager. You can choose to share or keep it private for a project.

Note: The Project field is required and defaulted to the Public project. The new network can be in the Public project for any other projects to share.

In the example, you click the drop-down menu to select a different project. The external network is for accessing a virtual machine from outside of the cloud, for example. This network is usually called public network but not the same as the public property in the cloud.

Remember, the cloud is not just for administrators.




In some sense, the user should be able to figure out what to do with the clouds’ self-services, at least from the view of a user’s role and ability. A pre-defined role is assigned to a user at creating time. The role helps narrow down what a user can or need to do. In general, a user logs in and navigates through simple user interfaces. The visual shows a simple navigation panel on the left only for menus:

• Overview

• Instances

• Image Templates

• Requests

The interface is extra simple in comparing to the Administration Dashboard navigation. A user’s ability to do some task should be obvious to anyone. For example, a task might be disabled or invisible to a user. The upper right corner icon reveals which user account is logged in.




At the Infrastructure as a Service level, the two most common service requests are instances or images. As shown in the visual: after the Overview menu is the Instances menu. The main page lists the instances that the user has access to. Think of an instance as an object with properties like status, cloud environment, project, owner, IP address, host name, and so on. Located on the top of the instance list, the action menu bar lets users operate on the instances. The visual shows operations such as refresh, start, suspend, stop, delete, and more.




The web user interfaces are presentation of data that is received from the Cloud Manager service interfaces. Think of the services like application programming interfaces. Where there is an interface, you can query and receive data from it. The visual lists the web services that are provided by IBM Cloud Manager with Openstack. Append the word services to each name. If all the services do not address your need, then you might want to explore other levels of cloud services, such as Platform as a Service.




Although the Cloud Manager user interface takes after Bluemix’ interface, the services are limited to pre-built images. When you create an image in Cloud Manager, you import the image from other environments. If you need to do more works on the virtual machine, you have to move up to a Platform as a Service environment such as Bluemix. The visual shows a view of the Bluemix Dashboard that users can create apps, containers, or run virtual machines. Apps and containers are software packages that are light-weight in comparing to virtual machines.

For more information on IBM Bluemix services visit the below URL:

https://www.bluemix.net/




For a quick comparison with Cloud Manager services, Bluemix provides many more services for developers. Note the differences are in user roles. A developer can put some of these services together quickly to create new apps. The app can also be tested or run from the Bluemix workspace. Therefore, it is also an operational environment. The visual shows parts of the Watson services in the main page. There are many other services as listed in the left panel.




In summary, Bluemix applies similar approach in using templates. You choose a template to start with. Then, you add programming libraries as the base components such as Java, Python, Ruby, and so on. You can always get more services from providers other than IBM in the market place.

Bluemix online documentations is available at the URL below:

https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/





Keywords check them out.




The remainder of the critical keywords for this Unit.




Please write your answers below:

1.

2.

3.

4.




Check your answers.




For your labs review these steps that you will be doing.

1. Recognize the multiple cloud service points in the lab environment

2. Recognize cloud services are not created equal

3. Identify the work in managing a cloud environment

4. Identify the different self-services that are provided for working with a cloud




Can you say yes to these statements?

1. Recognize the multiple service nature of a cloud

2. Identify cloud expanding points with compatible interfaces

3. Differentiate cloud software products by services

4. Summarize overall views of getting into the cloud



learnquest learning library content · 2016. 6. 17. · ther efore, in this unit, you will learn...

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