Saturday, December 18, 2010

Visibility in the cloud


One of the challenges in moving a virtual machine from a private data center to a public cloud like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Rackspace Cloud is maintaining visibility into performance.

The article, Cloud-scale performance monitoring, describes how the sFlow standard delivers the visibility needed to manage the cloud infrastructure. In the case of a private cloud, where the physical infrastructure and virtual machines are dedicated to a single organization, the visibility provided by the infrastructure can be shared with internal customers and used to manage the services deployed in the cloud.

However, in a public cloud the infrastructure is owned and operated by the cloud service provider and customers are typically given very little visibility into the shared infrastructure hosting their virtual machines.

For example, the diagram at the top of this article shows three virtual machines, VM1, VM2 and VM3, hosted on two physical servers, Server 1 and Server 2. If these virtual machines were hosted in a private cloud all the elements of the physical and virtual infrastructure shown in the diagram can be instrumented with sFlow providing visibility to the management team.

However, move the three virtual machines to a public cloud and only the virtual machines are visible. A Management Boundary separates service provider resources from the customer resources and it is no longer possible to know which virtual machines are hosted on which physical servers or to see network and system performance using sFlow from switches and servers.


The diagram above shows the elements from the example that are visible in a public cloud deployment. The example is representative of a typical small scale deployment: the Vyatta virtual appliance (VM3) provides routing and firewall capabilities, VM1 is configured as a web server and VM2 as a database server. One of the benefits of moving to the public cloud is the ability to scale up the number of servers to meet demand. The article, How Zynga Survived FarmVille, describes using a public cloud provider to handle rapidly changing workloads. The architecture mentioned in the article is a widely adopted, scale-out, implementation of the elements shown in the diagram - see Memcached for additional details, large scale deployments of this architecture may involve thousands of servers.

In order to provide visibility in a public cloud deployment, each virtual machine must be responsible for monitoring its own performance. The Vyatta virtual appliance already includes support for sFlow. Installing Host sFlow agents on the virtual machines extends visibility to include network and system performance throughout the virtual machine cluster - see Cluster performance.

A key benefit of deploying services in the public cloud is the ability to dynamically add and remove capacity. In this environment, sFlow monitoring helps control costs by providing the data needed to closely match capacity to demand. In addition, many organizations operate hybrid clouds with some workloads running in a private cloud and others running in the public cloud. sFlow simplifies management by delivering integrated visibility across all the physical and virtual elements in the private and public cloud, providing the measurements needed to manage costs by striking the optimal balance between public and private cloud capacity.

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