Hybrid cloud delivery
The complete lifecycle of a cloud service includes internal and external cloud resources — from request through self-service provisioning to decommissioning. This lifecycle is tailored to the needs of the business, with the flexibility to deliver the full required software stacks and the management rigor to ensure the operational integrity of the cloud.
This topic includes these sections:
Hybrid cloud delivery ensures successful use of the cloud by implementing layered provisioning processes through a self-service portal supported by a service catalog. Once provisioned, intelligent policies govern the initial placement and ongoing management of those cloud services in the environment. With cloud lifecycle management in place, IT can achieve the fundamental goals of a cloud environment: agility, cost savings, and a more optimized use of resources (whether personnel, servers, or capital).
Even the most basic clouds, such as those supporting development efforts, still have a diverse set of users who require differences in instance size, monitoring requirements, service level agreements (SLAs), or security and compliance options. The users each need a specific cloud service to truly meet their needs and should be able to select from a variety of offerings to optimize individual configurability. The more robust, flexible, and role-based the service catalog is, the better you're able to satisfy the user.
Many organizations approaching cloud computing today already have some experience implementing virtualization in their data centers. Extending the traditional virtualized environment, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management delivers an operational model for the lifecycle of cloud services and the use of public clouds in a hybrid model. Every resource in the environment goes through a lifecycle that, when defined and appropriately automated, provides a seamless and predictable cloud for IT and the business.
BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management encompasses:
- Service-catalog-establishment — Enable your users to select their own solutions through self-service requests with tiered, configurable services; oversee your users through customizable role-based access and flexible approval workflows.
- Cloud-service-delivery — Ensure that your cloud is fulfilling all of your needs during its lifetime by supporting provisioning and de-provisioning, facilitating patching and configuration management, and supplying ongoing policy-based management.
- Cloud-resource-management — Manage your cloud resources proactively by defining resource pooling, on-boarding local and external resources, and enabling secure multi-tenancy.
Hybrid cloud delivery overview diagram
Hybrid cloud delivery in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management
The goal of hybrid cloud delivery is to manage the dynamic nature of the cloud environment to accelerate provisioning, facilitate flexibility, and rapidly meet the needs of the business. With the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution, your organization can deliver flexible, customizable cloud services while maintaining a structured, controlled, and dynamic IT environment.
Initial decisions around cloud lifecycle management will help lay the foundation for the technology decisions going forward, ensuring that the environment is flexible enough to address anticipated areas of growth in the future. Cloud computing management will help you:
- Meet business needs by providing flexible cloud service offerings
- Improve availability by delivering efficient single and multi-tier cloud services
- Optimize costs through intelligent, policy-driven placement of cloud services
- Improve availability by ensuring broad resource support for physical and virtual environments, as well as private and public clouds
The administration of the hybrid cloud environment occurs through an administrative portal, which is customized to the needs of tenant managers (who manage the users of the cloud), service designers (who create and configure cloud service offerings), and cloud administrators (who manage the resources of the cloud). The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution has a user-friendly, flexible portal environment for administering all three aspects of the cloud environment: (1) Service catalog, (2) Policy-based operations, and (3) Underlying resource management.
Stages of hybrid cloud delivery
The BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution supports the full lifecycle — from request to retirement. The cloud lifecycle starts with a user needing to request a service from the cloud. Requestors need a self-service portal by which they can request, augment, and retire their cloud services.
Driving the portal is a service catalog that aggregates the service offerings available, by role, to the users. Each offering can be associated with a vast array of configurable options, defined by the service designer or cloud administrator.
Once a request is initiated, a workflow is invoked — either fully automated or with manual steps (depending on the request and on the organization's needs). Once approved, the service is automatically provisioned.
To exist, a cloud requires full-stack provisioning — server, storage, and network resources, as well as middleware, applications and other software elements. This provisioning can be in any environment (virtual, cloud, or even physical) and spans server, storage, and network resources.
The placement of the service depends on the nature of the workload, information about the user, capacity and performance information from the cloud, and a variety of other configurable factors that drive a policy-engine within the Service Governor.
Once provisioned, the user receives the cloud service, and the service enters its operational phase, where the normal day-to-day activities of performance, capacity, and compliance are managed.
Once a cloud service is no longer required, users will need a mechanism to decommission that resource. Good decommissioning systems operate on-demand, at the user's explicit request, or according to a predetermined schedule.
Stages of hybrid cloud delivery diagram