Cloud service delivery
Once a cloud service is approved, there are three major components to delivering that service. First, there is the act of provisioning the service — from the resources through the operating system and up to the applications. Second, there is the challenge of placing the service in the environment, according to a set of policies. Finally, there is the ongoing effort of maintaining and managing the cloud service throughout its lifetime.
Multi-tier cloud service provisioning
In order to provide the most flexible service stacks for users, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management supports a very flexible underlying provisioning capability. Traditional virtualization provisioning is image-based, requiring IT either to standardize on a very small set of images or, alternatively, manage a library of hundreds of unique images. The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management approach is one of controlled customization, delivering flexibility for the user, within constraints designed by IT.
This is accomplished by marrying the Service Blueprints with automated full-stack provisioning. Full-stack provisioning allocates physical resources and an operating system in the environment; provisions and configures network containers for multi-tenant support; and layers middleware and applications into the cloud service. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management can even layer compliance rules and monitoring tools into each service delivered. The provisioning behind the solution gives users precisely the stack they require, while also maintaining the tight controls necessary to manage a complex IT environment. In this way, IT is not burdened with maintaining an enormous template library.
This provisioning can be in any environment (virtual, cloud, or even physical) and spans server, network, and storage resources. In fact, using BMC Atrium Orchestrator Adaptors, the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution even supports the provisioning of Amazon Web Services resources. Because the goal of the cloud is to better use resources all of the time, service decommissioning or retirement is a very important function, completing the lifecycle.
Policy-based placement
Each cloud service not only must be provisioned, but also, must be located somewhere in the shared resource pool. That location should be based on a number of factors, including:
- The identity of the requester
- The nature of the workload
- The capacity of different elements in the environment
- The applicable compliance policies
- The required service levels
- Organization-specific policies
In order to properly place a workload, therefore, the cloud management solution has to take a policy-based approach to intelligent placement, weighing the different guidelines and making a decision. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management accomplishes this through a service governor, which acts as the intelligent policy-engine for the cloud environment, making both initial placement decisions and performing ongoing management.
Ongoing operations
Once provisioned, the service enters its operational phase, where BMC solutions manage the normal day-to-day activities of performance and capacity management, as well as patching and configuration management. That core functionality ensures that capacity and performance information is adequately feeding placement decisions of the Service Governor. Further, as part of baseline cloud operations, the functionality to maintain patch levels and configurations of cloud services in an automated manner is core to the capabilities of the cloud environment. Finally, by virtue of the provisioning mechanism, updates to applications and other software elements can be assured to be up to date for all future cloud services.
Key benefits of cloud service delivery include:
- Enable provisioning / de-provisioning
- Perform ongoing patching and configuration management
- Provide continuous policy-based management